Virtual Hangperson, Part the [REDACTED]

So, yes, here we go. Replies may be delayed based on availability.

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D O * Y O U * L I K E * H O W * I * D A N C E ?

I ' V E * G O T * Z I R C O N I U M * P A N T S !

C O N S E Q U E N T I A L * E N O U G H

T O * S L I P * Y O U * I N T O * A * T R A N C E

(Tally Hall - Ruler of Everything)

Letters that did not make the final cut: B(ooooo!)

Punctuation and other marks that might help give it away have been removed to make things more interesting. The letter amounts are right. And, of course, as words and lines get filled in, the punctuation will start to return.

Also, because I'm absentminded or subtly evil, I will apparently try to mislead you by telling you that letters that are there aren't.

Despite all of this, we have a winner! Cheers to onyxlynx for perseverance.

These are lyrics from a group that will likely be a one-hit wonder, thanks to having been selected for a music bit on the O.C. - Tally Hall. I like them not for just their wonderfully weird lyrics, but because they've got good music, too. If yo u can pick up a copy of their album, do so. I think you'll enjoy it.

And for the rest of you, the news. - 23 November 2010

Cheers, fellow travelers along the parade of links. We start today with good news for a change - after protest from the student body and the community, a school district reversed themselves on their decision to ban a work on classical art based on the prevalence of nudity in those works. Hooray for art surviving the challenge. Further reading on a different book banning is Knute Berger nailing on the head why one should teach books like Brave New World, because the world they paint is offensive and to be avoided. If you don't get pictures, satirical or otherwise, of the worlds to be avoided, then you don't know when you've run full-force into them, be they Brave New Worlds or 1984s. And please, stop trying to hide behind other words to describe what you're doing - whether a suspension or otherwise, you're trying to get rid of it from students.

Before we begin, a letter announcing the end of the Second Great War, praising the work done by the fighters, but also recognizing the sacrifices of lives laid down in the conflict.

Last out of the headlines, however, is how the search for a missing unicorn brought some happiness back to the populace.

Out in the world today, Fire exchanged between the North and South Koreas, with the natural response to "Who started it" being both sides pointing at each other. While it's unlikely that they'll actually go to full-bore war with each other, the two Koreas are beginning to feel like an old couple bickering with each other.

A British Columbia court has taken up the issue as to whether the anti-polygamy law of Canada is a violation of the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms regarding religious expression and practice - the government wishes the ban upheld to prosecute a sect practicing plural marriage. We should keep an eye on this one, in case it spreads and/or jumps a border to the south.

An LGBT advocacy and support organization in Kyrgyzstan needs to raise 15,000 USD to have an office/safe house/shelter, having been repeatedly bounced from their previous places due to complaints, threats of violence, police raids, and other actions to make the safe space feel unsafe. To see what they are doing and a breakdown of their costs, visit a site that helps to break down the costs and see how little it takes from many people to do great good.

In Pakistan, a woman sentenced to die for blasphemy is not guilty and should be granted clemency, according to a top government official in the country.

A person who claimed to be a high-ranking Taliban official, engaging in negotiations with NATO and the Afghan Government is not who he said he was, and there was a lot of money and negotiations wasted on this person.

A story, well worth reading, of finally giving in to one's health instead of continuing a practice that was causing harm. And out of the deal, the writer has found that they are doing a better job of local sustainability and helping lower her environmental footprint, too. There was, of course, a significant amount of feedback, positive and negative, to that decision.

Domestically, if traveling in the new touchy-feely TSA realm (well, new to certain groups, apparently - women and people of color have been alleging they've been subjected to this kind of stuff long before white dudes started to copmlain), recall that regardless of whom you are, or what gender you present as, you still have rights. Even if there are some additional issues that may have to be considered, and you have to keep a watch on for persons who will give you a hard time about gender presentation, remember, too, that many of those agents are uncomfortable about having to do enhanced pat-downs, so unleashing on them is probably not the right idea. Get after the idiots who decided that kind of theater is worth investing in and will actually work, the other idiots who think that it's actually a good thing to have these invasive proceudres done in the name of security, and the really big idiots who think this whole thing is "isolated incidents" blown way out of proportion.

A student with Down Syndrome was forcibly withdrawn from a course close to final examinations on the reason that she was a disruption to her classmates. Her classmates, upon hearing of this, asked precisely what type of psychoactive substances the administration was using and signed a unanimous petition to keep her in the class, a petition, as well as a student Senate vote, that was summarily ignored by the administration. One hopes that the discrimination claim that will follow the administration's volley strikes true and hurts. According to the letter sent home (assuming this document is the item in question), it appears the instructor was tired of having someone disabled in their class and told the administration that they had to get rid of her. Which makes things that much more problematic. I thought one of the good effects of education was supposed to be about broadening your horizons and meeting people you wouldn't otherwise meet and having to interact with them.

Finally, former Vice President Al Gore believes that corn ethanol subsidization was not good policy, and that he was guilty of focusing a little too much on his home state instead of the good of the nation. That last sentence certainly seems to describe much of Congressional action these long decades...

In sciences and technologies, research that suggests conditions such as schizophrenia may have something to do with a retrovirus that is part of human DNA, set off by the response to a differnt infection like toxoplasmois and influenza.

Looking in on the brain, reserachers think they might be able to develop a brain training exercise for addicts to allow them to control their cravings, based no being able to have them control a mouse cursor with two different brain states.

Into opinions, where the stated positions of the Republican Party appear to be willing to sacrifice the country to enrich their party and its backers and to not give the Democrats any sort of political victory. Perhaps now that we're past brass tacks and well into the bickering, we wish for the times when Obama and Palin were more similar, appealing to their audiences with well-placed rhetoric, than where we are now. As things are, <the pollsters find the electorate disillusioned with the President and possibly willing to elect a Republican to the office in 2012. And while much of the Demcoratic base apparently thinks he's going to be a good nominee, there are some who wish that he would remember where his second testicle is, or perhaps replace them with ones made of steel for the next two years. That is, unless he's going to suddenly implement a way-leftist radical agenda using executive regulatory powers to impose penalties for carbon dioxide pllution and to remvoe the secret ballot from unionization. If either of those actually come to pass, color me impressed. And then I will watch the fray.

Mr. Carroll suggests that the New START treaty should be delayed until the new Congress comes in, rather than be passed in a lame-duck session, because the desperation to pass it only proves how weak and ineffective a treaty it will be, and that arguments for its passage aren't actually true. The argument, however, that the New START treaty weakens America without touching Russia is predicated on the idea that the United States actually needs modernized weapons of mass destruction to ensure that they can destroy the world many times over in the name of protecting the world from other people who want to destroy the world many times over. Wouldn't it be a better idea to work toward the disarmament of all weapons designed to destroy the world many times over? No sane actor would engage in such a thing, and having all the sane actor disarming gives less opportunities for the non-sane actors to get their hands on atomic material ready for a weapon, yes? So why not pass New START based on that argument alone?

Mr. Avlon shouts "Dragon!" and hopes not to be crushed by an anvil in bringing up the Park51 project's perfectly legal request for Lower Manhattan redevelopment money from the federal government. As with all of the "controversy" surrounding the Park51 project, he predicates his argument on a "should they" rather than a "can they", before slinking away by saying that the project doesn't have enough capital to qualify for it anyway. So not only does he shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater, if caught, he would claim that there was no reason to panic, because there weren't any obvious flames.

Speaking of conspiracies, After 47 years, not everything that's been collected about the Kennedy assassination is publicly known, which continues to fuel the theories about the work - the Atlantic article covers five myths about the current narrative.

Last out of opinions, Mr. Katman claims that the increasing unionization of faculty and university workers is going to prevent conservative voices from being on the faculty, because they will have principled objections to paying a fee to the union that negotiates their contracts. The first argument - In this economy? Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! - is soon supplemented by a more thought-out version - If your principles are such that you won't join or pay an agency fee to a union as a consequence of being able to teach, then you necessarily limit yourself to those institutions that have no union or are ideologically opposed to them. Which means you can teach, but it's more likely to be at Liberty University than georgetown. If, instead, your commitment to education (and to making sure you have "conservative voices" in the "liberal university" atmosphere) is more important, suffering the indignity of being part of a union should be a minor inconvenience, and hey, maybe you'll lead the charge to de-certify the union and get everyone back to the way they were. Just be aware of the potential consequences for doing so, that's all.

Last for tonight, a gender form that does its best to be inclusive for as many responses as can be thought of.

Sforzando: A barrage of body-image insults.

The Junk Science Department, in combination with the Concern Troll Watch, presents to you a commercial website posting claiming that women don't know they're overweight, because their BMIs are too high and they think they're healthy! The response, as best put down by the Curvature, is as follows - get frakked. Start with the fact that BMI has its problems as a measure, that BMI puts people into boxes and encourages shame, instead of actually taking into account body type, that overweight people aren't necessarily unhealthy, and all these other factors that are being discarded in favor of fat shaming in women, and then come back and tell us that you still think this is good research. A different take on it, that still has some problems, but is much less about the moralizing, is the fact that science has not determined whether our obesity epidemics are a result of "moral" choices entirely, or whether we have biological factors that are contributing to them. If we have biological factors, but the insistence is that one can become thin entirely through human decisions, then we lose an important part of actually helping people to become less obese, to supplement their decisions with assistance, much like how smoking cessation patches are supposed to help make the decision stick.

Worst of the lot, though, a rare specimen, indeed - a column that insults everyone that it was trying to provide suggestions for. Mr. Pendry divides his derision into two different places - anyone claiming there is a lack of healthy nutrition available for children is simultaneously a nanny-statist and blind, then that fat kids are socially undesirable, but school systems shouldn't concern themselves with the consequences of that past mandatory physical education classes, because they can't do what they're chartered to do, anyway. His first attack is that the fattening of America is a matter of choice, not of a lack of food options - after all, all those fast food joints that are popular and profitable are right next to your neighborhood Wal-Mart, which has all the healthy food that is supposedly missing from all the neighborhood. We have plenty of food around, and some of it is even the healthy stuff that the nannies want to force us to eat. For all that bluster, however, he doesn't address the two main concerns about food deserts: the fact that healthy food is more expensive, in preparation time and in money, for anyone to have in their house, and that the "desert" part of food desert is a lack of groceries and places that offer healthy options that are around poor neighborhoods and can be reached by foot power (whether a pied or en velo). Poor people do not have cars to drive to the commercial parks where the megamarts are, and people working two jobs do not have the time to drive themselves to the megamarts. Combined with having to choose between eating unhealthy for a whole week and healthy for only half, most people will choose to be able to eat the whole week. And will do so from a place that is convenient to them, on the way to or from work, which does not usually make detours to places where the megamarts are. All of this is predicated, as well, on the neighborhood being somewhere that you want to go out into. If it's a place that's dangerous, the grocery can be close by, and nobody will go there. So while Mr. Pendry can look at the top-down map and say "There's all that food nearby!", unless he's walking the streets to see how it all looks to the people who live there, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part two of this concern about children getting fat is that letters of concern going home about the health of the children are unnecessary in two different ways - fat kids know from home that they're fat kids, and should already be receiving their proper dose of social shame from their parents (and probably their peers at school, too), and school should not be concerned about the physical health of the children inside, when they can't even manage to teach them the rudiments of a proper education in maths, sciences, language, and history. If they must, however, Mr. Pendry suggests that we have mandatory physical education, of the getting people sweaty with exercise variety, and that doing that will result in the desired fat-shedding of the children. (Again, most likely with a healthy dose of social shame for the non-athletic children from their more athletically-inclined counterparts.) Mandatory physical education would be a good thing, although I'm inclined to say that we could find as much place for yoga and tai chi as much as contact sports, marching band, or weight training. Healthy body, healthy mind, as they say. Big kids need recess, too, after all. I'm kind of surprised that he didn't make any mention of the school lunch program or nutritional requirements for student lunches. That would have been more in character with the first part. Instead, he seems rather okay with the idea that body-image stress should be constantly applied to young people, whether from parents or peers, despite the evidence and the anecdotes of how body-image stress often results in worse health. Or perhaps he's just dismissive of public schooling in general, and he can't be arsed to have a constructive thought about them. That brings the line of how the schools should be focused on the mental subjects and forget about the physical ones into context, at least. I wonder, though, if he'd be in favor of removing shackles like No Child Left Behind and other standardized-test driven measures from the schools and funding them enough to do the job of actually educating the children.

In any case, rather than provide possible solutions, he seems more than happy to just provide mockery, ending with his lament about the lack of a good chili dog, just to go for one last tweak.