Archive for 3/4/2008 - 27 Adar I, 5768

The University of Illinois should play the Dutch Ajax soccer team

What with Chief Illiniwek and the Ajax fans…all we would need is Prince Harry to show up dressed as Mother Teresa, and we could offend almost everyone in the world.

and

Poetic News from May 29, 2002 (the very first month of my blog):

I t happened nearby
eyeballs scattered in garden
children ran screaming
father says “they looked like meat.”
eighteen of them, from nine cows.

Transylvanian boy,
worried dead mum a vampire
thrusts dagger in heart.

The number 18 before I started blogging a lot about numerology, and Transylvania long before I named the blog what it is named today. I find this highly significant.

Hypothetical:

You publish something on the internet. That something is reprinted in its entirety within an essay without your permission. It is reprinted on a hate site. It is being used as an example of the imagined evils of society. You are worried about the type of person who would see this and try to track you down. You are also worried about calling further attention to yourself since while reprinting the entire work is against the law, printing excerpts is completely legal, and they could easily add parenthetical remarks such as (due to threats of legal action rest of work has been removed from essay) which would increase my fears from website visitors.

(I linked to this reprint last week. That link has been removed.)

This girl will need many years of counseling due to her name (if she doesn’t wind up in jail for murdering her parents).

I posted the below quote exactly a year ago:

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”

– Frank Zappa

And i made this comment:

I’d like to add the addendum, ‘and it helps if the beer from your country doesn’t taste like horse urine.’ Of course, there would be some individuals who will go unnamed who would query how I know what horse urine tastes like. I write poetry and fiction. I have a creative mind. So I can state with authority, Horse urine tastes (sigh) like the beer made in my hometown.

And in a comment to that post last year, I clarified that I am proud of our horse (or Clydesdale) urine, but when our august family sold the Cardinals, they lost their best asset.

It still tastes like horse urine. But with no other options, I will drink it.

Rain Pryor, the daughter of Richard Pryor and a Go-go dancer/actress he met in the 1960s and married briefly, is performing in a show entitled Fried Chicken and Latkes based on her mixed heritage.

The Golem: Adventures of an Israeli Superhero. A Webcomic. Fresh from the Gaza Strip, superhero team of The Golem, and Lillith, are assigned an even more hazardous duty …. teaching a group of third graders.

(A brief look at past episodes, and I don’t think this is The Lillith, just a woman named Lillith. No demoness properties I can ascertain as of yet.)

The Hebrew word to the right of “Comics” is pronounced “Komiks”. It’s just written in Hebrew letters. That’s what happens when you revive a dead language. You end up using English for new concepts.

8.2 quake registered in Indian Ocean today, just South of the 9.0 epicenter in December. Another tsunami is possible, and residents are being told to be vigilant/careful, but no evacuations yet.

Google on their Google Blog have just announced that they conducted their first India Code Jam, where they looked for the best coders in India and South Asia. They titled the entry: “Will Code for Rupees”.

Outsourcing is now so mainstream, it’s something to brag about.

Just in case you didn’t know it was available:

Google in Pig Latin

“Eelingfay Uckylay” Ýsounds really twisted

But what’s even more twisted is somebody got paid to translate all their help pages into Pig Latin.

Why couldn’t I have had that job?

The Nazi-NativeAmerican teen who went on a rampage in Minnesota was also a blogger.

I guess the good news is it doesn’t appear he was into D&D.

I’m not sure its possible to get more hypothetical than Peter David does in his blog today:

Understand, I’m not saying “Fallen Angel” is continuing. I’m not saying that. And if it were, which I’m not saying it is, I’m not saying that there would be a different artist, because it’s a moot question since I’m not saying it’s continuing in the first place.

But if it were continuing, which I’m not saying it is, and I were in the market for a new artist, which I’m not saying I am, who would you want to see drawing it?

I have a link to the left for info on the Canadian Pianist who had his own television show back in the 1950s called, “At Home with John Newmark”.

Today I discovered the authors of “Two By Two to London Zoo”

Collecting venomous snakes, poison arrow frogs, giant scorpions and black widow spiders is not everybody’s idea of a summer holiday. Meet John and George Newmark, identical twins. They spent 25 successive holidays collecting reptiles and invertibrates from jungles and swamps, deserts and other wild and remote regions of the world. It was a hobby, and they presented their ‘loot’ to London Zoo after each trip - up to 3,000 creatures in all.

The book can be downloaded here (With or without pictuers). Unfortunately, George passed away in 1985, and John in 2004. I have no idea if I am related to either. (Though odds are, if I am related to one, I am related to both, since they were identical twins.)

PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES - Limited number of challenges each side in a trial can use to eliminate potential jurors without stating a reason. May not be used to keep members of a particular race or sex off the jury. Most states also allow the parties to a case to dismiss the judge assigned to the case without having to prove actual bias. Called a peremptory challenge, this right may usually only be exercised once by a party in any given case. — source

A former prosecutor’s claim that he conspired with a judge to keep Jewish jurors off a death penalty case will be the focus of a court hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

The California Supreme Court ordered the hearing in San Jose to investigate the sworn statement of John “Jack” Quatman, who said he and other lawyers in the Alameda County district attorney’s office routinely used peremptory challenges to keep Jews and black women off juries in capital cases.

Quatman’s testimony was filed on behalf of Fred Freeman, who was sentenced to death in 1987 for killing a bar patron during a robbery in Berkeley. As the prosecutor assigned to Freeman’s trial, Quatman said he colluded with the late Alameda County Superior Court Judge Stanley Golde to keep Jewish jurors from hearing the case.

“No Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber,” Quatman alleges the judge, who was himself of Jewish descent, told him. — source

Lethal injection was first used in California in 1996. They still have the gas chamber as an option though. So does Missouri.

Of course, I don’t find any method of execution humane.

This blogger works for Google. Apparently they have a laundry room at work. She was washing her underwear. Into the laundry room walks Colin Powell. He tells her off for mixing colors.

A link to this entry appeared on Google Blog, implying its veracity.

The judge set today as the date Terry Schiavo’s husband could remove the life support. So the GOP controlled congress has invited her to testify before Congress on March 28th.

She’s in a coma, and in no condition to testify, but the only reason they did it was to circumvent the court decision — with the hope they can come up with another way to extend her life between now and then.

But I am curious whether they will go through with the farce. Actually bring her before Congress and let her “testify”. And how long they will wait for her to actually speak before they decide she has ‘finished’ testifying, have her removed, and allow proceedings to continue.

And I wonder if this will be aired on CSPAN so the world can watch it happen.

Friday morning, March 1-8,
I watched the news in a state
of horror and disbelief…

Or so began a poem I wrote about a fire that occurred 11 years ago.
Tonight/tomorrow morning is the 11 year anniversary of the demise of the Wabash Triangle Cafe.

(The poem linked to is written by a fellow open-mic poet who performed regularly at the Wabash. It’s better than the tribute poem I wrote.)

A French television show will decide over the next few months who the Greatest French person ever was. Victor Hugo is one of the 10 contestants.

The BBC version of the program crowned Sir Winston Churchill as history’s greatest Briton, while Germans voted for their former chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and the Dutch for the murdered right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn

source

I wonder who would win in a US version? That’s actually a scary concept. Who would Americans vote for as their greatest citizen ever?

Back in 2002 they found out Religious Teens make better sheep behave better in school.

Last month it was reported that Teen devotion is high, but their actual knowledge of religion is low.

This is getting a little more coverage this week, as papers are reporting that Mormon teens scored the highest.

If you were wondering where your religion stands in teen “engagement in practicing their faith”…

On most of the measured criteria, Mormon youths– whose church runs daily high school religion classes– were the most engaged in practicing their faith, followed in order by evangelical Protestants, black Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

(sigh)

Only 12% of Jewish families talk about Religion at least once a week.

This is not good. The unaffiliated families talk more about religion.
However, we are good at sending our kids to summer camp.

I’m back at the library again. I am on an every-other-Saturday schedule, picking up some new music to listen to, and checking the BookCrossing Zone shelf to see if any interesting books are available.

There was a Tom Clancy this week — The Bear and the Dragon. But I’m not a huge Tom Clancy fan, but if you are, and would like a free copy, there’s one currently at the Brentwood Public Library.

I personally released two books into the wild, which can be found at the exact same place as that Tom Clancy.

1) Richard Lederer’s Anguished English. If you have a love for the English language, this book is guaranteed to either make you laugh, or cry, or both.
2) The Celestine Prophecy. It didn’t change my life, as the book claims it will, but it changed some people’s lives, I’m sure. (For example, it probably changed the life of the author.)

The five CDs I have decided to listen to this week:
The Best of Earth Wind and Fire vol 1
Dixie Chicks’ Home
Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Between Here and Gone
The Very Best of Cheryl Crow
John Mellencamp’s The Best that I Can Do

I tried to follow the advice given recently on Warren Zevon music…but apparently ITunes doesn’t have a complete collection of his albums available. They do have The Wind, which I already have, and Life’ll Kill Ya, as well as the tribute album, and an album just titled Warren Zevon, but not much else. I bought Mutineer with one of my Pepsi caps last night. I may try to look for the entire Life’ll Kill Ya album rather than buy it from Itunes.

A friend recently introduced me to the music of Stephen Lynch, and I am now also in search of more of his stuff. If you are easily offended, I advise you not to listen to any of his music.

France joins Canada in making P2P legal.

(The key is that there’s a tax on blank media that goes towards artists, which even those who are using the blank media for other purposes have to pay.)

Mel Gibson must have decided he didn’t make enough money last year, so he’s re-releasing The Passion. (Because the merchandising of the movie last year proved that was what it was all about.)

He’s cut a few minutes from the movie, hoping for non-R rating, but he didn’t get it, so it’s unrated instead.

Because of the non-rating, and the fact it’s out on DVD, many theaters aren’t playing it. Which is bound to lead to protests.

The Gorgon was a maiden bold
Who turned to stone the Greeks of old
That looked upon her awful brow.
We dig them out of ruins now,
And swear that workmanship so bad
Proves all the ancient sculptors mad.

– Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Here are the two covers for HP and the Half Blood Prince.

Both contain Harry and Dumbledore. Whether this means Dumbledore is the HBP is anybody’s guess.

Sky News says Dumbledore is one of the favorites to die in book six…and if it happens, it will be the first prediction I have gotten correct.

There will also be a deluxe edition with a 32-page illustration insert. It can be yours, if you’re willing to pay $60.

Update pictures of all three covers

TV Guide is running a poll online about Star Trek.

One of the questions is “Who was the most annoying character?”

Earlier today the top vote-getter was “Wesley Crusher”, which isn’t all that surprising. Then Wil Wheaton casually mentioned it on his blog.

Now “Alexander Rozhenko” is in the lead. Brian Bonsall probably is wishing about now he had a posse. (Or perhaps he doesn’t care, and isn’t paying any attention to this at all…)

There’s nothing quite like stuffing a ballot box.

I wonder how many people pledge money to the Fraternal Order of Police because they’re scared not to…

If you turn them down, then get robbed, when you call them for help, will they come as quickly?

And whatever happened to the good old fashioned method of responding to requests for money over the phone?
1) Say yes, offer a small amount. Say $10. Ask for a pledge card in the mail.
2) When they send the pledge card in the mail, do nothing.

Now agencies are calling back and saying “We haven’t received your pledge.” And I have to pretend I’m sorry.

I even have received a bill from one agency that said something like
2003 pledge - $$
2004 pledge - $$
Total: $$$$

Like my verbal pledge over the phone was a contract, and I still owed them for 2003. I’ve always figured if I didn’t fill out the pledge cards, they’d ultimately get the message, and stop calling.

A Kentucky kid wrote a short story about zombies overruning a school. a school, not his school. He has been arrested as a terrorist.

What I find even more disturbing is who turned this kid in. His own grandfather.

Individual on a mailing list of former college classmates had a question. He had a business contact with an individual in Japan….all he had was a name, and he wanted to know which was more likely: Mr. or Mrs.

Another member of the list replied with the information that a Google Image search turned up 3 women and no men with that name.

Not conclusive…definitely…but a very creative way to address the question.

The government is considering classifying political blogging as a contribution to a campaign.

I can’t afford to give the maximum to a campaign in real money…but depending upon how much my blogs ended up being worth, I could make myself look like a big contributor. Cool.

(Well…not, really. Just because the internet has allowed any individual to create a press that is readable by millions, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to consider themselves members of the press.)

Baseball players born on this date (whatever today’s date may be)

Baseball players who died on this date (whatever today’s date may be)

I am in the middle of reading two novels right now.

Widow for a Year by John Irving (first time)
and
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. (reread)

I hope I don’t get the two confused.

Though a movie has been made from Irving’s too.

On March 12, high school students will start taking the New SAT.

The change that has high school students sweating is an Essay portion. “About freakin’ time” I say. Grammar and spelling skills among HS and college students have taken a dive into the crapper in recent years.

The analogy section is also gone. no more:

Pot is to Nicotine as illegal is to…

Of course, students shouldn’t worry. The new test will still be “graded on a curve.” I had to take the test back during the years when it wasn’t. Back when a high score actually meant something.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow on the Ten Commandments being displayed on Government grounds.

The NYTimes compares it to the recent Under God controversy, but I feel there is a much more apropos comparison ñ the Xmas Tree/Menorah disputes.

Currently, you canít display one without the other. But in order to get this result, several groups had to proclaim in court that the Menorah wasnít a sacred object, to the surprise of many in the Jewish community.

Professor Laycock, who filed a brief on behalf of the Baptist Joint Committee against the display in the Texas case, Van Orden v. Perry, No. 03-1500, disparaged as “sham litigation” the effort to depict the Commandments as anything other than profoundly religious. To defend the Commandments as a historical or legal document is “to desacralize a sacred text, to rip it out of context and distort its meaning and significance,” he said. “It ought to be unconvincing to people outside the religious tradition and insulting to those within it.”

I predict weíll get a decision where it is okay to display the commandments like they are displayed in the Supreme Court building Ö as part of a larger display containing depictions of other historical religious legal texts. But it wonít be okay to display them alone.

Which will be just as stupid of a decision as the Xmas tree/Menorah compromise.

The US has just become the last country in the world to declare the execution of juveniles illegal.

So we now hold a dubious honor, somewhat similar to the State of Mississippi which was the last state to ratify the Civil War amendments — in 1995. Of course, they just forgot about a formality. We’ve been actively supporting the execution of kids while other nations were looking at us in horror.

Admittedly, child execution still occurs in a few places, but not officially sanctioned by those countries, as is stated in the article:

…the United States had carried out 19 of the 39 executions of child offenders that Amnesty [International] has recorded world wide since 1990.

The other countries that carried out such executions were Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But Freer said even those countries now consider the practice illegal, although they have not all succeeded in halting it.

An invisibility cloak has been invented! They call it a plasmonic shield. It renders objects invisible to the observer. Unfortunately, it only works on microscopic objects…which are already undetectable to the human eye. So it’s not very useful.