Archive for 1/4/2008 - 26 Tevet, 5768

Tonight I am attending an interfaith educational forum among my synagogue, the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis, and The Manchester United Methodist Church.

A long-time friend who grew up Catholic, but recently joined the Manchester UMC will be there as well. She doubts she will participate in the long-term West County Dialogue Group, for which the forum is the springboard. Whether I do depends upon a few factors.

If the monthly sessions are always on a Tuesday night that will be a negative, though it won’t eliminate the possibility. It is the evening for my weekly writer’s group, but missing one Tuesday a month won’t be horrible.

If I know no one there, that would also be a negative. Even though this is a dialogue where it is expected you will meet new people, it is always helpful to have someone there you already knew. I have been a member of my synagogue for my entire life, and know a lot of people in it, so the odds are I will know someone.

Finally, I don’t know too much about the concept behind the Mediating Interfaith Learning Experience & Services (MILES) model. Hopefully I will learn more tonight and be able to make a decision whether or not it sounds like something I am interested in participating in.

Jan 28, 1986

I was in a wheelchair, returning from the physical rehabilitation room at St. Louis Children’s hospital. I entered the room, and someone (a nurse, or perhaps the mother of my infant roommate) told me what had happened, and then I saw the replay on tv.

I know there is at least one individual who reads my blog who will be interested in knowing that there is a robot out there that can pour a beer.

…aside from stocking and cooling up to six cans of beer and two mugs, upon the press of a button, the machine will open up a can, and pour in into the mug with a perfect head every time.

Google Inc’s decision to block politically sensitive terms on its new Chinese search site has drawn the scrutiny of U.S. lawmakers, who next month will probe American technology companies that help Beijing’s censors.

Congress is considering a law.

The legislation envisioned by Reporters Without Borders was spelled out in a January 6 online campaign calls on U.S. firms to refrain from hosting e-mail servers, filtering search engines, hosting blogs and discussion forums in repressive countries.

I’m not sure how they will define “repressive countries”, but my suspicion is that Germany and France will not be included, even though Google is also censoring sites on their French and German search engine.

Sites Google Censors in Germany and France. (This is also a great list for those of you who want to see the underbelly of the internet…all the major hate groups are there. Hate speech is banned in Germany and France.)

update
For those interested, I believe I found another site: kahane.org
On google.com there are 561 pages, and on google.fr and google.de there are only 560 pages.
If I find the time, I will try to discover which page is missing.

Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, went from #56,439 on Amazon’s BestSeller list to #21 in one day. It’s now at #1. Why?

It’s Oprah’s next book.

The copy everyone’s buying

The one I recommend.

What’s the difference?

Well, you’ll pay about $4 more for mine, but you’ll get the entire trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident. It also won’t have the “Oprah’s Book Club” stamp on it.

As eloquent and as important as Night is (and a great choice for Oprah), Dawn packs an equally disturbing emotional wallop. And some could argue the questions raised by Dawn are more timely today. What makes one a terrorist or a freedom fighter? If you were assigned the duty to kill someone, for your country/cause, would you want to get to know that person first?

The Accident? Not nearly as powerful as the other two. Not bad either. But both Night and Dawn together are easily worth the price alone.

Overall, I wish everyone to be happy, which includes Britney.

And while I may be happy that there is one less star promoting
pop-Kaballah or my own term for it, “hollywood kaballah,” I do feel
sorry for those who feel strongly about the Hindu faith, for they are
surely cringing at the news that she is focusing her religious
interests in their direction for awhile.

source.

Above is a graph of the number of visits per month for the past year to Victor Hugo Central, a web site I created in 2000 devoted to the works of the 19th Century French author. The peaks in March and November are probably related to the beginnings of research projects on college campuses in the US. But even during the slowest months of the summer, there are several thousand visitors every month.

Now…someone’s going to point out that there are about half as many visitors this January, as there was last January. And that’s true. But we are only half-way through the month. I am hopeful that is the cause, for otherwise, the site has suffered a major hit that is completely unexplainable.

Another interesting statistic is where the last fifty visitors to my site came from (I just checked, and there have been five visitors since I started working on this post from Italy, the US, Canada, and Mexico. I’m the visit from St. Louis, Missouri.)

1 United Kingdom Cardiff
  2 United Kingdom Abingdon, Oxfordshire
  3 United States Saint Louis, Missouri
  4 United States Goldsboro, North Carolina
  5 United States Washington, District of Columbia
  6 United States Melrose, Minnesota
  7 United States Monroe, Michigan
  8 United States Tallahassee, Florida
  9 Canada Ottawa, Ontario
 10 Finland Billskog, Southern Finland
 11 Taiwan Taipei, T’ai-pei
 12 Taiwan Taipei, T’ai-pei
 13 United States
 14 United States Chicago, Illinois
 15 United States Lexington, South Carolina
 16 United Kingdom Manchester
 17 United Kingdom Maidenhead, Windsor and Maidenhead
 18 United Kingdom Old Hurst, Norfolk
 19 United States Carlisle, Pennsylvania
 20 Italy Milan, Lombardia
 21 Australia Ashfield, New South Wales
 22 Vietnam Hanoi, Dac Lac
 23 Greece Athens, Attiki
 24 United States Columbia, Maryland
 25 United States Bay Village, Ohio
 26 United Kingdom Bury
 27 United States Wichita, Kansas
 28 France Paris, Ile-de-France
 29 United Kingdom London, Lambeth
 30 Switzerland Pully, Vaud
 31 Finland
 32 United States Naples, Florida
 33 Philippines Philippine, Benguet
 34 United States
 35 United States Baltimore, Maryland
 36 United States Sioux Rapids, Iowa
 37 Norway Bergen, Hordaland
 38 United Kingdom Leverstock Green, Buckinghamshire
 39 United Kingdom Stevenage, Norfolk
 40 Canada Ottawa, Ontario
 41 Philippines
 42 United Kingdom London, Lambeth
 43 Finland Turku, Western Finland
 44 United Kingdom Hatfield, Norfolk
 45 Finland Turku, Western Finland
 46 Austria Vienna, Wien
 47 Poland Bretowo, Gdansk
 48 United States Midvale, Utah
 49 India Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh
 50 United Kingdom Slough

In a workshop all week for work, I have been unable to celebrate an
important anniversary on the appropriate day. On January 9, 1986, I
entered St. Louis Children’s Hospital. I remained there for four
months. I wrote the below poem about 8 years ago

The Disability

When I was seventeen I entered the hospital
And when I left it four months later
I was bound to a wheelchair
Until my legs found the strength to walk again.

I had been diagnosed with a disease
Called Guillain Barre Syndrome
Where the antibodies that formerly destroyed a flu virus
Went on to destroy the insulation around my nerves

And without the insulation, while my brain
could still send messages to my muscles,
the messages never reached their destination.
It was as if all the phone lines were dead.

The antibodies were quick and within 24 hours
I was paralyzed from the neck down.
Luckily the insulation around the nerves
knows how to regrow. But it’s slow.

The thing I tell people, noone believes
is I was the first in an epidemic of disabilities.
Before I entered the hospital, wheelchairs
were few and far between.

Oh, I would see them occasionally,
but after I left the hospital
the numbers grew exponentially.
It can’t be a coincidence.

Laugh, think me insane if you will
but how else would you explain
the phenomena of the few
before and the many after?

My old post about the Blonde Star commercial, was quite popular. (and you can still download it there.)

But this has got to be
The BEST blonde joke ever!

Did you know Google had a search engine limited to just US Government websites? They call it UncleSam, and its been around since 1999. Just…they don’t link to it with all their other services, so it’s very hard to find out about it.

Unclesam

There was some stollen in the office today, and a coworker wanted to know what stollen was. I looked it up on a whim and discovered it has origins around the Christmas holiday and is actually supposed to resemble the Baby Jesus in swaddling clothes.

This, of course, will not prevent me from eating stollen, because stollen is delicious, and its origins are irrelevant.

Another holiday tradition is to eat herring at midnight on New Years. I eat herring year round.

My Box Office Predictions were going pretty well until this past weekend. I said the great ape would remain on top until Jan 6, but the Cat came back.

I’ll stick with my previous long-shots, but it will now be the Lion who is taken hostage this weekend.