Semi-productive day off - 16 November 2007

[silveradept]

Went out, did stuff, came back. Didn’t spend too much, I think. Maybe? Either way, I’ve accomplished another of those tasks, hopefully investing in something that will be worthwhile and lasting. At least, that’s the idea. For what I’m paying for it, it had better be good. Once it arrives, I’ll have a nice place for guests to sit that can convert into a guest bed as need. Of course, I don’t have an entertainment center or boob tube for the new piece of furniture to face yet, but maybe a few paychecks down the road, something like that will appear. Or maybe someone will be kind and front the money for such things as gifts for VEWPRF. I don’t know.

Oh, speaking of VEWPRF, the Play! concert series is in Seattle in the late parts of January, and thus, I’m going to be going. So maybe I’m just a sucker for orchestrated video game music. But I’m probably going to go again. It’s been great the previous two times. That’s another possible VEWPRF gift.

Tried Quiche Lorraine again tonight - it didn’t work out as well as the first one, but it’s still yummy.

There’s the padded rugby game for the conference championship tomorrow - a game that I will miss live, in its entirety, it being my day to work. Perhaps because of that, things will go well (Hey, the Lions have been great while I’m not watching them). And getting in my dig at an Ohio state university (contractually required? Maybe), I present the campus of Columbus mourning an unofficial mascot - an albino squirrel. Sure, the peopel at my alma mater feed the squirrels, too, and have a squirrel club, I don’t think any of them have gone to the point of having a part of the campus idolize one of the squirrels.

To the news, such that it is. The United States’ paranoia over Iran heightens, thanks to a new report released by the IAEA that says, while Iran does have the capability to potentially produce weapons-grade material, they are using it only for fuel-grade enrichment.

Yet another pro-war columnist whining that the mainstream press isn't covering the lack of attacks in Iraq. Apparently, no news really is news. In my opinion, I’d rather see material about how Ron Paul's campaign plans on eliminating individual income tax, without cutting spending to match. Or that people received calls that started claiming to be polls, but instead turned into attacks on candidate Romney, because that at least gives us information about things that are happening, rather than trying to make the absence of something into something. If one insists on Iraq-related material, though, Americablog offers some statistics on how things have gone. Even a film review of a send-up of the post-World War III America tells us more than the absence of news from Iraq. (And there’s even a Kapowski in it - maybe a cousin of the detective, greyweirdo?)

Or maybe the populace is more concerned about how Barry Bonds breaking records messes with the game of baseball, through even just the cloud of steroid use and the personality of Bonds. When baseball records become tainted, or even potentially so, they lose effectiveness and their power. They become useless when the asterisk appears in situations like these. There will probably be a lot of people rooting for the next home-run hitter to erase Bonds as fast as possible.

Roger Cohen throws his support behind Barack Obama, saying that the senator is the candidate most likely to reflect the world and act with recognition of the people outside the borders of the United States. He would certainly put a new face on politics, and that might be enough, along with good policy, to jar the perception of America and its leaders into something better than the fecal matter the Bush administration has been wallowing in.

Our education majors and teachers already know this, but here’s a great example of the idea that if you make learning fun, people actually do learn, and do well in school. Meet the Harry Potter themed school year. By doing such thematic work, in fact, the school raised its rankings from worst to first. Not to say this will work for everyone, but if you make education interesting, you never know who might actually learn something.

A federal court of appeals told the Bush administration to come up with better fuel-mileage standards for light trucks, the category that SUVs fall into, taking them to task for not accounting for carbon emissions and their possible links to global warming. The Administration proposed adding a mere 1.9 miles per gallon improvement.

The New York Post has more Hello Kitty Hell. I think that the Monkeyfilter article linking to that photo said Hello Kitty is thirty years old today. That’s right, we’ve been subjected to Hello Kitty Hell for thirty years now. Wow. And there’s always more in the vein of Hello Kitty, like Moofia figures.

Harvard professors suggest that the Reformation was the birthplace of what we now think of as fundamentalism. Instead of being a liberating experience where everyone is now able to read and interpret for themselves, the researchers suggest that those who elected to read for themselves were warned that if they read wrong, dire consequences would result.

Other religious scholars will take on the issue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster at a conference of the American Academy of Religion, noting the success of the original idea has spawned, to some degree, a religion. One more in line with the Discordians than the people they’re mocking, sure, but potentially a religion by itself. There’s probably some Discordian wisdom involved here in serious study of the non-serious. If not Discordian, the Buddhists and Taoists probably have something about to do with it.

I don’t recall who the song is by, but I remember the lyric “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind,” and you don't let pedophiles work in kindergarten.

Detroit continues to fall apart, hit hard by housing problems, losses of jobs, and the general malaise the Detroit-based automobile manufacturers are suffering. The BBC article suggests that perhaps Detroit is a good indicator for how the rest of the country might slide if things continue to go downhill.

The Cool Things department says, Look at that! With the help of a brain implant and a computer, it may be possible for someone unable to speak to think their words and have them spoken. The test subject has been paralyzed by a car crash, but his brain still works just fine. Would we be able to eventually get the idea to work so that said paralyzed person could manipulate an exoskeleton, and thus rejoin life in some manner?

The TED talks are really neat things to see and listen to - whenever someone around me links to one, I download it and have a look at it, and they’re all cool to look at so far. If all of them are like this, then I should probably be doing a lot of downloading and watching. All of that just to introduce Erin McKean talking about language and the role of the dictionary. Rather than seeing the dictionary as the final arbiter of what’s in the language and what isn’t, the dictionary should instead become the compendium of words in the language, and decisions about what words to use should be left to those that will be using the words. Whee, lexical ability!

To help with my memory problems, there are already suites of exocortexes in development. Most want to automatically record the data of my life, so that when I want to remember who it was that I went to high school prom with, I can find and retrieve a conversation I had about her. (I do remember, still, at least for now, who I went with, when I went with a date.) Or something that will remind me that I promised to go pick someone up from the airport today, when I made the arrangement some four months ago. Capturing everything sounds neat, but I suspect everyone has parts of their life they’d rather forget. At least the brain can replay events in fast-forward when asleep. So I’m going to fast-forward mode. I hope there aren’t too many commercials. And then there’s work on the other end, too.

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Remembering things is why I keep such a detailed LJ and Scrapbook :) So years down the road I'll remember more details :)

[przxqgl.livejournal.com]

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind,

jim croce

[silveradept]

Good. What's the rest of it, though?

internet is good for stuff like this...

[przxqgl.livejournal.com]

Uptown got its hustlers
The bowery got its bums
Forty Second Street got Big Jim Walker
He a pool shootin' son of a gun
Yeah he big and dumb as a man can come
But he's stronger than a country hoss
And when the bad folks all get together at night
You know they all call Big Jim boss, just because

And they say you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off an 'ole Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Well outa South Alabama come a country boy
He said I'm lookin' for a man named Jim
I am a pool shootin' boy, my name is Willie McCoy
But down home they call me Slim
Yeah I'm lookin' for the king of Forty Second Street
He drive an old drop-top Cadillac
And last week he took all my money, and it may sound funny
But I've come to get my money back
And everybody say Jack, ooh don't you know

That you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off an 'ole Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Well a hush fell over the pool room
And Jimmy come boppin' in off the street
And when the cuttin' was done
The only part that wasn't bloody was the soles of
The big man's feet, woah
Yeah he were cut in 'bout a hundred places
And he was shot in a couple more
And you better believe they sung a different kind of story
When a Big Jim hit the floor, aw

Now they say you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off an 'ole Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim

(Spoken)
Yeah Big Jim got his hat, find out where it's at
And it's not hustling people strange to you
Even if do got a two piece custom made pool cue...yea

Now they say you don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off an 'ole Lone Ranger
And you don't mess around with Slim.

Re: internet is good for stuff like this...

[silveradept]

Ah, thanks. Not that it will necessarily get the earworm out, but it'll at least tell me whether that reference works or not.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Using Harry Potter as a teaching tool is pretty cool..provided the kids aren't banned from reading Harry Potter because some idiot decides it promotes witchcraft. That type of program would never work in the States for that reason.

Way to have a pedophile working in a school. I hope the person who didn't read the file got in some type of trouble, too.

[silveradept]

The Potter program would work in the States. Just not at those schools where some idiot decides that the witchcraft part is more important than the children learning. So it would work in a few places, at least.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

You mean, there are schools that still allow Harry Potter to be read?

[silveradept]

Sure. Some even say that it's literature.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Wow. Who'd have thought Harry Potter would actually be recognized for what it is!

But seriously though, if a school wanted to do this in the US, what if a parent opposed the idea?

[silveradept]

Then said parent would go through the normal channels one goes through for requesting a reconsideration of the curriculum. Kind of like challenging a book.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Wow. That would be pretty rough. I know that if a parent has a real problem with a book that's being read, they can request their child read a different book independently and the kid leaves the class during the discussion, but I don't know how that would work if ALL lessons were focused on the book.

--
also, we lost. 35-31. And the last few minutes SUCKED because MSU has an asshole for a coach who thought it'd be good to argue the refs over a freaking TIME OUT....but the clock was still running and no one was playing because no one actually called it as a time out.

[2dlife.livejournal.com]

Parents oppose reading lists all the time. The question of course is whether the value of reading the book outweighs any potential detriment. This is why it's generally held to be OK to read Huck Finn in spite of its racial themes and almost no school would ban The Merchant of Venice (although to be fair, the modern reading is generally sympathetic to Shylock rather than anti-Semitic).