Whoo-hoo. - 02 October 2007
Oct. 3rd, 2007 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptStory time was much smoother today, and felt better all-around. Of course, I also had nine more children than I did the last week, but that’s okay, just meant more people having fun. I did have to walk through the rain to the post office and back. And then when I got home, I find that the voter registration card I was looking for had arrived... just after I had mailed out a new application, thinking things had gone weird. My sense of timing is perfectly preserved. At this point, it just happens to be working against me. D’oh.
My professional self nods invitingly at the opinion expressed by Musings and Migraines that librarians will be at the vanguard of the revolution. When one received a National Security Letter and the accompanying gag order, they went to court to reveal themselves as the recipients. They were denied at the time, but later on, the location that was given the letter was revealed. Apparently it wasn’t as vital anymore to hide from the people that libraries are targets of snoops. Librarians are doing a lot more, too, to make sure that your right to read anything without government agents questioning your patriotism. And we’re not too fond of your nosy neighbors that think they know what’s best for you to read, either. So go read a challenged and/or banned book and spite them. And be glad that, so far, nobody’s been convicted of obscenity just by writing words - that may be changing soon, if one federal prosecutor has her way regarding a web site that had fictions of children being molested, tortured, and sometimes killed.
Things of potential interest to me and all those who are looking into the business of raising young children (ugh, what an awful segue) - using baby videos/DVDs as a surrogate parent is not necessarily the best idea, according to a study published by University of Washington researchers. That said, in the press release for the study, the Baby Einstein series of videos was mentioned by name as a possible thing to avoid - Baby Einstein is now owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, and they came out swinging, questioning the science and demanding a retraction. The President of the University of Washington, to whom the letter was addressed, responded with a refusal to retract. This looks to be a staring contest until some other report that both sides can accept breaks the deadlock.
Making a strong showing for “Most Useless Phallicly-shaped object”, aside from [insert appropriate male person]‘s genitalia, a "Tower of Invincibility" is planned for construction in Washington, D.C.. Certainly not a large phallic-shaped object designed to invoke size comparisons or to attempt to show that America has a giant wang (that would be Florida, and with the age of many people flocking there for retirement, the position is probably apt as well). And not a middle finger sticking up as a giant “Screw you” to the rest of the world, either. This can only end in ridicule. Thus, mockery is on the agenda tonight. After having a hearty laugh at the big dick, point, laugh, and mock people who swear by bottled water as a superior product, considering that much of it is what would be tap water run through a couple of processes, bottled, and then sold back to you at an exorbitant markup. I’m not sure whether to mock or pity the people behind NRG potato chips, which are, indeed, caffeinated. Because caffeinated chips and soda is exactly what you need for those late-night programming runs.
After reading all of that, be sure that you brush up on hand gestures and their meanings (especially the places where an innocuous gesture in one country is a grave insult in another), and get ready to use them as we delve into darker realms.
New d00d in charge of the Joint Chiefs. He’s still got a long way to go. Deaths in Iraq are down by half this month. Fantastic. That’s still nearly 1,000+ dead Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. What’s worse, is that probably is progress, comparatively speaking. To try and help justify the continuing need for violence, a Navy Cross recipient describes why he supports the war - five things, four of which had to do with the way that Saddam Hussein treated his people, and one which might count as at least a half-point, but which also will reinforce the idea that Muslims are terrorists. Almost no justification at all for the continued action of fighting the Iraqi people and dragging them toward a conclusion that they seem to resist mightily. Covering ground about private security firms, in OpinionJournal, Ben Ryan paints security contractors as honorable, well-trained men that are inexpensive to field and accuses the mainstream media of painting them as monsters without knowing them. Perhaps it has been just a few rotten apples all this time, but that doesn’t inspire confidence in the professionalism of the contractors. Or the military and executive apparatus that employs them. Add in that the contractors may have been trying to cover their misdeeds, and confidence evaporates.
Speaking of money, the presidential campaign continues to be able to raise vast sums to be spent convincing the people that someone is the best candidate. Why spend $200 million for a $2400,000 / year job? The perks must be awesome. And the obligatory war spending shot - nearly a supermajority of Americans say that there should be less spending on Iraq with regard to the additional $190 billion dollars that Mr. Bush is asking for.
Ready some of those gestures before wading in to a Limbaugh column - David, not Rush, and laugh heartily and/or throw your favorite insult as he spews talking point after talking point about the war in Iraq. All stuff that’s been said before, with plenty of “grow up, children” and “Democrats are socialists and don’t understand the great ordeal being undertaken here”. Standard retort is Ben Franklin, with or without the double deuce. In addition, Ann Coulter has released a new book, nonpartisanly titled If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, so you can get a bonus helping of spew if you decide to leaf through it.
One more matter of free speech versus being a disturbance to wrangle over - from Prison Planet, the account appears to be that members of the group Code Pink were expressing their disagreements with a pro-war rally and were arrested, one for the heinous act of simply reading the Constitution. Reading some of the source material from Code Pink DC, it sounds like that peaceable disagreement was somewhat loud and attention-grabbing. In both accounts, however, members of Code Pink are arrested for exercising their right to free speech. What I want to know, though, is whether there is any law on the books, federal or otherwise, that allows demonstrators to be removed and arrested if they’re being “too loud” or a disruption to the event going on. Sort of the idea of one’s free right to swing fists ends at the point where someone else’s nose in contacted. The comment section on the Code Pink blog has a strong contingent of Anonymous that run several character attacks on the demonstrators and accuse them of being traitors and of not according proper respect to military veterans and their families.
Last out of this segment is the doom-and-gloom prediction of Operation Save America that Hillary will win, because God hates the way Republicans are fielding pro-choice candidates and Christians are okay with that. Not because of any virtue of Hillary, mind you, but all because God is pissed at Christians and Republicans for not keeping the Republican party worthy. In fact mass defection to a third-party candidate might end up happening if Rudy, who is not good enough for the evangelicals, receives the Republican nomination. Fred Thompson seems to think the same, but that he's the candidate that Dobson and OSA want. Perhaps, if things go really wrong, they’ll come to blows, like some Italian nuns did on Sunday, prompting the closure of their convent.
Doing that neat segue thing, still sort of related to Operation Save America, considering they were trying to get it closed before it opened, the Planned Parenthood clinic of Aurora, Illinois, opened today after being issued an occupancy permit. On the national front, however, abstinence-only programs still enjoy the favor of Fearless Leader, despite their repeatedly-proven inability to produce reduced rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among the target demographic. Furthermore, as the price of birth control rises and is unaddressed, there may be even more difficulties across all age groups. Funny how trying to enforce abstinence has this weird backlash where the opposite of what abstinence is supposed to bring about starts showing up even more.
Accidents in laboratories involving deadly diseases are on the rise. Luckily, no-one has died from these accidents, and the labs involved say the public was not at risk during any of the accidents. Still, there’s a reluctance in labs to report accidents that are required by the law. And that’s where people start getting antsy - if someone could come out of a lab like that infected with something contagious and deadly, the pandemic could be in third gear by the time anyone noticed. Accidents do happen, of course, but we’d like to make sure everyone knows when they do, just in case there’s reason to believe that things were not contained.
I think even the students at MIT would be proud of this particular hack - Eight artists built a secret studo apartment in the middle of the Providence Place mall and lived there, on and off, for about four months before being caught. The place was missing a few important things, like running water and toilets, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good.
People get attached to their robots, according to a Georgia Tech study. Well, yeah - people name things, and then as those things prove to be useful, people get attached to them. Even so much that they start working with the idiosyncracies and wonder where they go with firmware updates and the like. Perhaps we’ll be seeing our NS-5 units sooner, rather than later. Although if they look or sound like Elmosapien, I will run in the opposite direction. If they perform a function like Clocky, an alarm clock that beeps and then runs away from you, then maybe I will chase them, only to smash them with something. That could get expensive.
Instead, I think I will show off that there’s always more options for Hello Kitty Hell, like solid gold Hello Kitty playing cards. And from there, I will flee for sleep.
Well, almost. It being October, and with certain harvest festivals approaching, I can’t help myself. While it’s not, say a Chick Tract on the matter (which I could probably go dig up, if I really wanted to), why not have a look at Hairy Polarity, attempting to not only convince everyone that a certain children’s book series about a young wizard is a gateway into witchcraft of the evil and demon-conjuring kind (bonus points for having it through the girl that the boy loves, too. Anti-witchery and misogynistic all rolled into one!), but also displays a characteristic lack of invention when it comes to names and situations. Have a look at the first seven pages, and then realize that there’s still twenty-five more for poor Airy, getting manhandled like that so that someone can swing their sledgehammer at a bowl of water, expecting the water to be crushed. The narrative structure, characterization, and dialogue available in the sample are of such low quality that I could probably round up a crack team of fifth grade students and have them produce a work that was superior in every capacity but art. And depending on the fifth graders and the lead time I had, I might even beat them there, too. *sigh* I realize that there are plenty of exhortations in the Christian Foundational Writings to go out and convert the world, but I have a distinct feeling that he meant that you should go out and try to be as much like him as you could, day in and day out, and that through the virtue of your deeds and example, you’d bring more people into the fold. Selling the religion by not selling the religion.
Okay, bed time now. After all, I still have stories to tell.
My professional self nods invitingly at the opinion expressed by Musings and Migraines that librarians will be at the vanguard of the revolution. When one received a National Security Letter and the accompanying gag order, they went to court to reveal themselves as the recipients. They were denied at the time, but later on, the location that was given the letter was revealed. Apparently it wasn’t as vital anymore to hide from the people that libraries are targets of snoops. Librarians are doing a lot more, too, to make sure that your right to read anything without government agents questioning your patriotism. And we’re not too fond of your nosy neighbors that think they know what’s best for you to read, either. So go read a challenged and/or banned book and spite them. And be glad that, so far, nobody’s been convicted of obscenity just by writing words - that may be changing soon, if one federal prosecutor has her way regarding a web site that had fictions of children being molested, tortured, and sometimes killed.
Things of potential interest to me and all those who are looking into the business of raising young children (ugh, what an awful segue) - using baby videos/DVDs as a surrogate parent is not necessarily the best idea, according to a study published by University of Washington researchers. That said, in the press release for the study, the Baby Einstein series of videos was mentioned by name as a possible thing to avoid - Baby Einstein is now owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, and they came out swinging, questioning the science and demanding a retraction. The President of the University of Washington, to whom the letter was addressed, responded with a refusal to retract. This looks to be a staring contest until some other report that both sides can accept breaks the deadlock.
Making a strong showing for “Most Useless Phallicly-shaped object”, aside from [insert appropriate male person]‘s genitalia, a "Tower of Invincibility" is planned for construction in Washington, D.C.. Certainly not a large phallic-shaped object designed to invoke size comparisons or to attempt to show that America has a giant wang (that would be Florida, and with the age of many people flocking there for retirement, the position is probably apt as well). And not a middle finger sticking up as a giant “Screw you” to the rest of the world, either. This can only end in ridicule. Thus, mockery is on the agenda tonight. After having a hearty laugh at the big dick, point, laugh, and mock people who swear by bottled water as a superior product, considering that much of it is what would be tap water run through a couple of processes, bottled, and then sold back to you at an exorbitant markup. I’m not sure whether to mock or pity the people behind NRG potato chips, which are, indeed, caffeinated. Because caffeinated chips and soda is exactly what you need for those late-night programming runs.
After reading all of that, be sure that you brush up on hand gestures and their meanings (especially the places where an innocuous gesture in one country is a grave insult in another), and get ready to use them as we delve into darker realms.
New d00d in charge of the Joint Chiefs. He’s still got a long way to go. Deaths in Iraq are down by half this month. Fantastic. That’s still nearly 1,000+ dead Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. What’s worse, is that probably is progress, comparatively speaking. To try and help justify the continuing need for violence, a Navy Cross recipient describes why he supports the war - five things, four of which had to do with the way that Saddam Hussein treated his people, and one which might count as at least a half-point, but which also will reinforce the idea that Muslims are terrorists. Almost no justification at all for the continued action of fighting the Iraqi people and dragging them toward a conclusion that they seem to resist mightily. Covering ground about private security firms, in OpinionJournal, Ben Ryan paints security contractors as honorable, well-trained men that are inexpensive to field and accuses the mainstream media of painting them as monsters without knowing them. Perhaps it has been just a few rotten apples all this time, but that doesn’t inspire confidence in the professionalism of the contractors. Or the military and executive apparatus that employs them. Add in that the contractors may have been trying to cover their misdeeds, and confidence evaporates.
Speaking of money, the presidential campaign continues to be able to raise vast sums to be spent convincing the people that someone is the best candidate. Why spend $200 million for a $
Ready some of those gestures before wading in to a Limbaugh column - David, not Rush, and laugh heartily and/or throw your favorite insult as he spews talking point after talking point about the war in Iraq. All stuff that’s been said before, with plenty of “grow up, children” and “Democrats are socialists and don’t understand the great ordeal being undertaken here”. Standard retort is Ben Franklin, with or without the double deuce. In addition, Ann Coulter has released a new book, nonpartisanly titled If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, so you can get a bonus helping of spew if you decide to leaf through it.
One more matter of free speech versus being a disturbance to wrangle over - from Prison Planet, the account appears to be that members of the group Code Pink were expressing their disagreements with a pro-war rally and were arrested, one for the heinous act of simply reading the Constitution. Reading some of the source material from Code Pink DC, it sounds like that peaceable disagreement was somewhat loud and attention-grabbing. In both accounts, however, members of Code Pink are arrested for exercising their right to free speech. What I want to know, though, is whether there is any law on the books, federal or otherwise, that allows demonstrators to be removed and arrested if they’re being “too loud” or a disruption to the event going on. Sort of the idea of one’s free right to swing fists ends at the point where someone else’s nose in contacted. The comment section on the Code Pink blog has a strong contingent of Anonymous that run several character attacks on the demonstrators and accuse them of being traitors and of not according proper respect to military veterans and their families.
Last out of this segment is the doom-and-gloom prediction of Operation Save America that Hillary will win, because God hates the way Republicans are fielding pro-choice candidates and Christians are okay with that. Not because of any virtue of Hillary, mind you, but all because God is pissed at Christians and Republicans for not keeping the Republican party worthy. In fact mass defection to a third-party candidate might end up happening if Rudy, who is not good enough for the evangelicals, receives the Republican nomination. Fred Thompson seems to think the same, but that he's the candidate that Dobson and OSA want. Perhaps, if things go really wrong, they’ll come to blows, like some Italian nuns did on Sunday, prompting the closure of their convent.
Doing that neat segue thing, still sort of related to Operation Save America, considering they were trying to get it closed before it opened, the Planned Parenthood clinic of Aurora, Illinois, opened today after being issued an occupancy permit. On the national front, however, abstinence-only programs still enjoy the favor of Fearless Leader, despite their repeatedly-proven inability to produce reduced rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among the target demographic. Furthermore, as the price of birth control rises and is unaddressed, there may be even more difficulties across all age groups. Funny how trying to enforce abstinence has this weird backlash where the opposite of what abstinence is supposed to bring about starts showing up even more.
Accidents in laboratories involving deadly diseases are on the rise. Luckily, no-one has died from these accidents, and the labs involved say the public was not at risk during any of the accidents. Still, there’s a reluctance in labs to report accidents that are required by the law. And that’s where people start getting antsy - if someone could come out of a lab like that infected with something contagious and deadly, the pandemic could be in third gear by the time anyone noticed. Accidents do happen, of course, but we’d like to make sure everyone knows when they do, just in case there’s reason to believe that things were not contained.
I think even the students at MIT would be proud of this particular hack - Eight artists built a secret studo apartment in the middle of the Providence Place mall and lived there, on and off, for about four months before being caught. The place was missing a few important things, like running water and toilets, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good.
People get attached to their robots, according to a Georgia Tech study. Well, yeah - people name things, and then as those things prove to be useful, people get attached to them. Even so much that they start working with the idiosyncracies and wonder where they go with firmware updates and the like. Perhaps we’ll be seeing our NS-5 units sooner, rather than later. Although if they look or sound like Elmosapien, I will run in the opposite direction. If they perform a function like Clocky, an alarm clock that beeps and then runs away from you, then maybe I will chase them, only to smash them with something. That could get expensive.
Instead, I think I will show off that there’s always more options for Hello Kitty Hell, like solid gold Hello Kitty playing cards. And from there, I will flee for sleep.
Well, almost. It being October, and with certain harvest festivals approaching, I can’t help myself. While it’s not, say a Chick Tract on the matter (which I could probably go dig up, if I really wanted to), why not have a look at Hairy Polarity, attempting to not only convince everyone that a certain children’s book series about a young wizard is a gateway into witchcraft of the evil and demon-conjuring kind (bonus points for having it through the girl that the boy loves, too. Anti-witchery and misogynistic all rolled into one!), but also displays a characteristic lack of invention when it comes to names and situations. Have a look at the first seven pages, and then realize that there’s still twenty-five more for poor Airy, getting manhandled like that so that someone can swing their sledgehammer at a bowl of water, expecting the water to be crushed. The narrative structure, characterization, and dialogue available in the sample are of such low quality that I could probably round up a crack team of fifth grade students and have them produce a work that was superior in every capacity but art. And depending on the fifth graders and the lead time I had, I might even beat them there, too. *sigh* I realize that there are plenty of exhortations in the Christian Foundational Writings to go out and convert the world, but I have a distinct feeling that he meant that you should go out and try to be as much like him as you could, day in and day out, and that through the virtue of your deeds and example, you’d bring more people into the fold. Selling the religion by not selling the religion.
Okay, bed time now. After all, I still have stories to tell.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 01:32 pm (UTC)And Washington already has one large phallic symbol in it's city limits. Depending on who you ask, they have a few thousand more walking the streets.
In other news, i found a story I found somewhat interesting and thought you might too. Is there anyway to submit it to you, or should I just leave it in the comments here.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 02:19 pm (UTC)Just because there's one doesn't mean that another isn't going to try and move in on his territory. And of course, he'll want to be bigger, thicker and more phallus-y than the one that's already there. I'll agree with the assessment that there are probably a few more walking the streets there.
Leave stories in the comments - they'll either be worked into a later narrative or the regulars will get a look and comment at them.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 06:22 pm (UTC)http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_us/secessionist_movement_1
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 02:46 pm (UTC)I don't see where knowing what books someone is checking out is going to prove their a terrorist - I mean, what if your child is doing a school report on something related to terrorism so you take out the books, or if you're just one of those people who's curious about everything?
If they're going to prosecute someone for text only "child pornography", then they need to start looking at fanfiction.net and the restrictedsection.org!
I'm not a fan of Little Einstein, or of any of the Playhouse Disney shows. We actually had to do reviews of children's television when I was in one of my classes, and I don't remember specifics, but I know I did one Disney channel show, one Nickelodeon show, ad one PBS show. All I remember is noticing that the Nickelodeon show was actually more educational and taught more in an episode than the Disney show we looked at. Little Einstein wasn't around yet, but still. It seems that Disney focuses more on the "entertainment" -- Even an adorable show like Higglytown Heros (TMBG does the theme song!) repeats the same songs and lessons day after day on the show with little variety.
That is to say, watching American Idol is better for infants than no television at all. Of course, such advice is absurd.
Not so absurd. I mean, I'm not sure I'd use American Idol as a suggestion, but Baby television programs tend to dumb down their vocabulary, and use baby talk -- something that every parent is advised to NOT use around their children because baby talk hinders a child's vocal development.
I think the thing with bottled water is, at least for me, less of a "ooh, let's look trendy and buy expensive bottle water" and more of a "I'm thirsty, i'm running errands, I need water". And then I wind up re-using my bottle over and over until it gets too worn or ikky to use.
haha. When I was yearbook editor I had to edit out a photo of a kid for making the "wanker" symbol,and half my staff didn't understand what it meant.
I think what a lot of people fail to see with Birth Control is that it does so much more than keeping women from getting pregnant. Many women, myself included, went on birth control pills to regulate an irregular cycle. For me, the protection from getting pregnant is the extra added bonus. There are women out there with conditions that give them extremely painful periods, and BC helps with that, too. So really, it's probably doing more damage to those women than the women who use BC for the explicit purpose of not getting pregnant.
Hairy Polarity or whatever it was called was amusing for the first seven pages. And then I got to the eight. Seriously...WHERE IN THE HP BOOKS do they even use pentacles on the floor in "rituals"? Heck, where do they perform rituals? Even at the Halloween Feasts, while it's acknowledged to be a sort of holiday for Witches and Wizards, they certainly don't perform any of the traditional Samhain rituals....nor do they even call it Samhain. Seriously. People need to do their research.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 04:54 pm (UTC)Re: Obscenity case, pay attention. There are zero child pornography charges being brought. But thank you for demonstrating a common error. How many on the jury will make the same mistake?
Yes, you reuse the bottle and fill it with tap - there are plenty of others who swear by it as the only drinkable water here is.
There's several ways that teenagers and others try to "spoil" shots with hidden symbols and gestures. The "shocker" gesture was popular while I was in high school. (Better than the craze regarding NO MA'AM when I was visiting the high school for courses. Ugh.) I think the best one to have gotten into a picture would have been the fig, but I think it would have taken it being part of a play for it to have arrived safely.
Well, sure it has other uses - if it were caled, say "Cycle Regulator", rather than "Birth Control", maybe we would have never had this fight, or perhaps we would, but it would be under the context of the "side effect" that it helps prevent pregnancy. For people who want to make sure every girl is punished with a pregnancy for having sex, the name "Birth Control" is a lodestone.
With regard to Hairy Polarity, you're forgetting that to the mindset of people who are writing/drawing the tract, they already know everything they need to know and are just writing what is True. Even if they don't do rituals in the books, because they're such a gateway, the kids will discover the "real" witches and wizards, who do have the rituals, the pentacles, and the drugs and orgies (probably will be talked about in the later pages) and all the other things that fundamentalists "know" Witches do. It's such a simple transition from fandom to devil-worship, preying on the natural curiosity and impressionability of children (and their natural tendency to rebel against what's best for them, of course). Just like how Dungeons and Dragons was a gateway to devil-worship a few decades ago. Doing "research" would be doubting the Infallible Word of God, as expressed by His Holy Preacher, and all the results would be tainted by secularism or have been doctored to show that witches are harmless because of pressure from the vast Satanic conspiracy/the researchers are witches/devil-worshipers, etc, etc. Nevermind that the only holiday specifically mentioned by name, if I recall correctly, is Christmas.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 05:08 pm (UTC)(I'll write back to the rest later. knitting)
no subject
Date: 2007-10-03 09:23 pm (UTC)