Let's rumble, d00ds! - 24 June 2007

After the eventful days of yesterday, today I was able to confirm the fact that my diploma had arrived (and thus, I have the piece of paper that confirms my degree exists and that I have it. They can’t take it back now! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!), that I had been invited to a wedding of someone I knew in high school (and, now that I look back on it, was probably at least fond of me), which is, of course, happening on Saturday, which is the same time that I was going to see greywerido work his creative cookout mojo. Since weddings are often a once-in-a-lifetime thing, I have to beg off from the cookout to go to the wedding. Which kind of sucks, because there was guaranteed fun at The Weirdo’s.

And, since there were no catastrophes, real or imagined, in my life today, you get the steady dose of stuff that I normally have on tap. First, I suppose I should reiterate a warning - things in this list and/or opinions expressed may offend you. You are perfectly able to not read something you find objectionable, although it’s probably in those places where the best material and learning can be done.

Also, according to a polling of my recent entries on the whole memesheepery thing, my journal has received an NC-17 content rating for the following material (likely recently referenced):

* death (9x)
* rape (7x)
* sex (6x)
* dangerous (5x)
* porn (4x)
* zombie (3x)
* bomb (2x)
* lesbian (1x)

Thus, this arena is apparently strictly adults-only, were the FCC or the MPAA in control of its content. Since they aren’t (at least, not yet), if you’re old enough to understand what’s going on here, you have the right to be informed and to seek more information. What I find interesting are the choices of words used to determine this rating. Who knew that zombies were enough to get a high content rating.

Oh, yes, and probably because we make fun of government officials frequently - like the TSA response to a mother that had... a sippy cup (it’s a cup with a lid that seals and restricts the flow of liquid to levels that a baby or toddler can handle.). This brought on multiple officers and many people swinging their badges around. The cup was, apparently, also seized. That’s at the base point. Farther up the chain, the Department of Homeland Security's chief information officer denied the truth and the facts regarding whether or not US-VISIT had been hacked or had significant security problems. He said “Nope. None at all”, where the truth was “Um, yeah. Lots of problems, actually.” US-VISIT is the United States’ fingerprinting and photo system of visitors to the country. A denial like that makes you wonder what else may be compromised without anyone knowing it because there are better deniers or the security audit hasn’t focused on them yet.

The Democrats did some teamkilling themselves, getting the sponsor to withdraw an amendment to a spending bill that would make members of the House of Representatives lease hybrid vehicles if they were going to do so on taxpayer monies. As the party (are they, actually?) of Al Gore, the Democrats missed out on an easy way to get hybrids into the public consciousness and to possibly get more people thinking about fuel efficiency in a way that wasn’t entirely revolving around the price of gasoline. Continuing in the environmental point, and offering a potential Good Thing, convenience stores in Japan will have cellular-phone recycling bins installed. So rather than throwing out the old phone, recycling it into a useful device or reclaiming the precious materials used to make it will help lower the impact on resources.

We also poke fun at religious groups - and if our own happen to do stupid and silly stuff, we’ll make fun of them, too - but really, for them it’s sort of religious practice to look silly. Anyway, from a guest contributor to Jesus’ General, Sunday Morning with a Fundamentalist Christian. Just so that all us sinners know what we really should be doing on Sunday. A good thing, and hopefully one that continues to come back so that it can be reinforced into the minds of people who look for this, Senator Obama publicly stated that some right-wing evangelicals are using their religion to sow division in the people. I have to admit, with statements like this, if we’re in the business of choosing a Lesser Evil, the Senator looks better than many. We haven’t heard everything from him or anyone else, and campaign statements are sometimes just that - statements, not statements of policy or things to be held to later. We’ll see if the Senator can actually make it out of his primary. (For those looking to figure out which horse to back, if any at all, SelectSmart offers a presidential candidate picker for this point in the process. As more candidates declare, I suspect they will have to update their listings.)

Maybe a troop reduction come next spring? I wouldn’t bet on it, myself. There are far too many things and people committed to running as many people through Iraq as possible, and not really caring about the price paid in lives. As things are, they’re always saying how Moloch needs more for his sacrifice, so I doubt a reduction will happen any time soon, unless they can magically make their mission appear in a complete form by next spring.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation would like you to know that capitalism forces the mentally ill, who should be receiving treatment, into jail, where their conditions worsen. Cutting costs for treatment can result in these sorts of things, certainly, and it’s probably no secret that the jails hold more of the mentally ill than the hospitals do, simply because many types of mental illness often have people committing crimes, either against themselves or others. (Of course, that’s when they aren’t, say, in the library, because there’s no place for them to go and get treated or to live when they aren’t in jail.) It would be nice, of course, if everyone who needed it could get treatment, regardless of cost, but that would take significant government or private investment, and neither of those entities as a whole seems very interested in improving health care for the people that probably need it most and can afford it least or not at all. To try and help police and others have empathy and know what to do with the mentally ill when they encounter them, Virtual Hallucination gives the police a chance to experience what it’s like inside someone else’s head when they’re not feeling well.

Moving onward, then, don't believe your printer when it says the cartridge is out of ink - more often than not, there’s still plenty there. Drain it dry to the point where it can’t actually print any more before changing out the cartridges, unless your printer refuses to print on “empty” cartridges, unto which I say, get a better printer, or haxxor yours to run regardless of ink level.

Mondolithic Sketchbook offers a simple reason why people would want to get on colony ships and go to other worlds because they don't want a life of ease and comfort and seeing the earth as one giant neighborhood association. It’s a simple thing - people want to get away from their fellows. Why deny them that chance? Someone who had the unfortunate chance of having a plethora of middle names because her parents were fans of pugilists might very well want to escape a world that gave them such nonsense.

Keeping in the extraterrestrial theme, and once again, proving that the NC-17 rating is likely earned (much as I wonder how out-of-character it would be with my profession), pictures of what are best termed "alien porn". I know not what is being used as the model for the extraterrestrial in the second set of pictures, but Rule 34 strikes again, I suspect.

Biofuels may have hidden costs - in the form of government revenue collectors trying to collect taxes on motor fuel - the vegetable oil that’s being used to power the car. Which, I suppose, makes a twisted sort of sense. Still, one would hope that vegetable oil doesn’t start having the gasoline taxes just attached to it. Because that would probably make many housewives angry. Might spur conversion to biofuels, though, if you’re already paying the taxes on it.

Slinking out into a bit of left field, in one breath, all crop circles are made by humans. In another, the possibility of crop circles being magical sigils evoking something. Seems to be trading one thought about extraterrestrial beings for one about extradimensional beings. Although, the idea of a crop circle being used as a giant mandala has a certain literary appeal to it. Wonder if it might have been used as such in earlier or in modern times...

The Cool Things Department produces two new blogs that may be making their way into my regular listing - The Happiness Project, which has much to do with the making of happiness and what people think about it - reading might make you happier - taking some of the advice there might make you happier. Heck, just knowing that someone’s collecting stuff on happiness might make you happier.

The second thing out of Cool Things is a stellar example of making books cool to people, so I should be sitting up and paying attention to this blog - The Ancient Standard. With short blurbs like King Tut Loved Red Wine! Wait, Wasn't he Underage? and Pre-Columbian Pottery Porno , the standard offers up some images and text about a particular historical period and one of the potential Cool Things about that time, closing with a link to a book on Amazon under the title “Want to Read More?” It’s not too long, not too preachy, and offers the opportunity for further exploration. It’s a great example of a library recruiting tool. Even the tagline - “Ancient History that Doesn’t Suck” is great for grabbing and holding the attention of a target child or teen audience.

The Cool Things continue with eSnailer - a site that purports to mail a letter to someone in the United States free of charge. For those people who are otherwise afraid or want to take some time in their correspondence. Although, really, if you’re going to mail a letter, handwritten correspondence is best - the stamp, at 41 cents, hopefully isn’t too steep a price right now. Still, good idea, even if it doesn’t bring back the practice of people handwriting letters to each other.

The last for tonight is something that would take thought, but would probably be practicable - the Verbs Bad manifesto, which suggests that the elimination of verbs from the language would be a positive change, and a reflection on the current American society - passive. There are a couple hiccups that happen in the manifesto because of the lack of verb verbage, but it’s comprehensible. However, I like my verbs quite well, thank you. If things should change, I can try to sound verb-less, but I think the language might be pretty messed up until it could settle into the Newspeak. (And from there, it might actually not be that ungood of a leap into true Newspeak.)

Anyway, bed good. Sleep now.

Woog. - 25 June 2007

Today engaged the letterboxing drive on me, and we went out and collected a few more stamps (one of them was a set of face parts, in the end, we ended up collecting three faces worth, which was really neat. Playing Mr. Potato Head or something like that. Was great.) before annaonthemoon leaves tomorrow. It managed to get most of the afternoon to go in a pleasant manner, and nobody slipped on mud. A good day all around.

CNN missed a geography lesson badly, mistaking Afghanistan for Syria. Probably an isolated incident, but it proves that people really don’t do a lot of double-checking to make sure that everything actually works and is what it says it is.

It was not a good day for petitioners on the Supreme Court today - the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" student lost his speech case, with SCOTUS holding that the school was within its rights to order the banner taken down because it promoted drug use, in the school’s opinion. (In PDF form, the Court's opinion and the dissents on Bong Hits 4 Jesus, more properly titled Morse v. Frederick). Additionally, SCOTUS found that advertisements that have “issue advocacy”, even when they name election candidates by name and state a position, are permitted to be paid out of a corporation’s general treasury and, most likely, can be run all the way up to the day of an election (PDF). So we can expect a lot more political statements coming out of enterprises that are not specifically created for the purpose of advocacy, right up to the day of an election. Would that include things like churches, so they could pontificate officially without losing their non-profit status? Last, SCOTUS reversed an appellate court decision, claiming that ordinary taxpayers do not have standing to challenge the current occupant's faith-based initiative program under the Establishment Clause because there is no specific Congressional legislation or appropriation for those programs (PDF). The Executive Branch, if there aren’t any specific law tied to its programs, has free reign to do with its appropriations what it wills, it appears. All of these decisions went 5-4. I think this is another way that the legacy of the current occupant will be felt for years to come.

Looking at other matters around the world, in Iraq, one of the United States commanders in Iraq is worried that the Iraqi forces won't be able to hold the gains that the United States military is gaining. This sounds like a rather evil exercise in futility - take control of it, then lost control of it, to go take control of it again, each time losing more people. No wonder more United States troops keep going over.

Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, is gearing his soldiers to resist what claimed was an unconventional United States campaign aimed at overthrowing him, focusing much on psychological warfare, possibly as a prelude to military invasion. Mr. Chavez contends that his buildup is to resist aggression rather than to be aggressive himself.

Sidestepping into a different political realm, Wired has an article about a San Diego company working on developing a robot to pick fruit from trees or vines. Were it to be successful and somewhat economical, then there could be quite a stir about migrant workers, both documented and undocumented. A lot of people would be potentially work-less, excepting for those who could drive and utilize the robot. Assuming, of course, that the robot doesn’t require a significant amount of second-checking to ensure that it got all the good ones and didn’t put in any of the bad ones.

Other robotic-human relations up for grabs are cars that will drive themselves in an efficient manner, possibly reducing traffic jams and road rage, although potentially also preventing people from rushing to wherever it is they want to go and are worried about being late over. Aren’t many science fiction futures supposed to have the robotically-driven car? And, now that I think about it, arent’ they also supposed to have devices that will read your thoughts and perform actions based on them, too?

Jumping from progress to the ideas that will become progress, the FBI is issuing warnings to professors and academic institutions about the possibility of espionage from terror groups posing as international students. Apparently, that kind of research is valuable stuff, and academics, in their enthusiasm to teach people, might give terrorists just what they need. (If the terrorists can pay tuition, then they’re going to get, if you’ll excuse the pun, the most bang for their buck.) To that end, university students and professors may find that working late at the campus, traveling abroad, showing interest in their colleagues' work, having friends outside the United States, engaging in independent research, or making extra money could put them under suspicion. Of course, it’s not worded that way, but professors and students are being asked to monitor each other and report suspicious behavior to the FBI. This sounds familiar - people being asked to spy and rat on their neighbors. Where have I seen this before...

The author of “The Dangerous Book for Boys” offers his opinion on why he wrote the book and titles it "In Praise of Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces" - an argument of how sanitized and safe play has become, where even the possibility of getting dirty is anathema. Right at the end, though, there’s a different argument being presented that sounds to me much more like “Boys will be Boys, so stop trying to make them sit down and behave. Stop trying to coddle them and make them be noncompetitive. Quit telling them they shouldn’t be doing things that will get them in trouble or cause noise or disturbance. That’s making them into girls, and that’s just unmanly.” I don’t particularly like that argument, It’s the kind of argument that leads to “character-building” things for boys that aren’t into the traditionally masculine things (you know, the “sissies”), and increased stratification of gender roles.

After all that serious stuff, one silly thing - namely, Hieronymous Bosch action figures/sculptures. Perfect for the person who wants something for their table, but doesn’t want something that’s conventional.

Last is something skippable, which is why it’s getting cut - in honor of my little brother’s release from the service of the high school, a small look back on it. Thus, it’s a ( high school meme. )

Anyway, I think it’s probably time for bed. It’s not going to get any more oppresively humid in here, and people want to spend as much time as they have left with me around. So, ta ta for now.