Small town life . . . enough to make a shy, bald Buddhist reflect and plan a mass murder
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The scientific life
Marc Abrahams writes about the Annals of Improbable Research and the Ig Nobel Prize, as well as how he combined writing, science, and humor.
"That's the short version of how I got started. But everything I'm doing now is, one way or another, something I've been doing since about the age of 10: looking for things that might be a little different from what they seem; writing about science and things that are funny; and puzzling about what's real and what's not, what's good and what's not, what's important and what's not."
I like this Ig winner for its just-plain-freakiness.
Small town life
This small town is filled with some really, really bad drivers. Specifically, they are really awful at parking.
We can see Main Street from the window at work. We regularly watch people trying to park their cars. Sometimes we see people hit both the car in front and the car in back of them as they try to parallel park. We saw one woman hit the car in front of her, hit the car behind her, then hit the car in front of her again before she was happy with her parking job. The guy who owned the car behind her saw it all happen and said "thank God bumpers aren't made of metal anymore."
One of the best was a woman who had a real problem parking in front of the only other car that was parked on the block. She pulled in front of the parked car, backed up, hit the car, and left her car jammed up against the parked car. Then she got out of her car and walked away.
Goths in Missouri?
I guess not.
"Almost half of a $273,000 grant awarded in 2002 to fight the Goth culture in Blue Springs has been returned because of a lack of interest — and the absence of a real problem."
Although it's hard to imagine being a goth as a real problem anyway.
Politics
My son went on a bike ride today. After he got back he said his legs were "as wobbly as John Kerry's political stance."
Midget-sized, again
Just like last month, I found a pair of pants I liked. They're a petite small. But of course, I have to hem them up 6". I don't get it. These clothes are supposed to fit short people. Why are they so damned long?
It's a classic
Gotta love the Odysseus (oops, I mean Ulysses) theme here. It's really about Nixon and Kissinger on tape.
Our secular origins
via the New Humanist magazine. America's founding: a secular, not Christian, event by Lloyd Omdahl.
"Theologians interested in revising American history tend to vacillate between two contradictory positions. Either America is God's favored nation or the country is a pit of unrepentant sin. This contradiction probably drives the unsubstantiated idea that God has chosen us above all other peoples. If we are God's chosen, then it becomes legitimate for us to pass oppressive laws compelling sinners and religious minorities to submit to our prescription of public behavior."
How bizarre
Okay, these 2 teenagers meet in a chat room. The younger one poses as 5 or 6 different people and through a series of elaborate stories convinces the older one to meet and kill him. Now the younger one has been convicted of "inciting his own murder." This is really one of those stranger-than-fiction stories.
Unschooling
Education, making a living, and myth and reality today. From Chris Corrigan.
"The most important thing we can offer children, whether in school or not, is an ongoing reflective conversation that facilitates their own understanding of their own learning style. This meta-learning trumps all the content we can stuff into their skulls because it encourages them to engage with the act of making meaning out of the world, a critical skill for evaluating one's own place in society, and the contexts in which one operates."
The power of prayer
Columbia University prayer study author pleads guilty to felony charges. This seems so bizarre. The study reported that women had increased success with in vitro fertilization when strangers prayed for them. How did that ever get published?
Old person wisdom
One of my clients (he's 86) said today that your mind is like your left arm. If you don't use it, it will wither up.
Creepy crawlies
Yesterday we found 2 good-sized masses of tent caterpillars on our apple tree. Each mass was about 5x12" and the caterpillars were just sitting there, not moving much at all. After we looked at them for a while, I figured I better kill them before they started eating. When I took them off the tree, I found a sort of "bed" of silk under them, and they all peeled off together. We'll be counting them later today when I get home.
Overheard conversation
Younger daughter: Mummies don't move very fast.
Older daughter: No, that's because they're dead.
Younger daughter: Yeah, their feet drag.
Older daugher: Of course, they can move fast. If someone puts them in a car.
My dad said
"Condoleezza Rice is the best evidence we have that the Republicans just don't understand affirmative action." He also said he thought of this while eating bockwurst. Is there a connection?
Yummy
I like this peanut butter banana sundae (I got the idea from Skwigg, just scroll down and see the pretty pic on the left side). But I've learned that it really is better if you don't nuke the banana with the peanut butter. I love Bananas Foster and fried bananas and plantains, but cooked bananas taste weird in this sundae.
Big stink
"Las Vegas officials are worried the stench of rotting garbage may drive tourists away from the downtown area.
There's also the problem of human waste."
Why is every sentence in this article a paragraph?
Must have been painful
"Little crystals of ice, like frozen tears, clung to her eyelashes as her large brown eyes fell to the ground, . . ."
No, I didn't write that. And I try to keep my eyes in my head.
Must update
my wardrobe.
Man boobs
Now that Troy is out, men will be rushing to the gym or the plastic surgeon to build up their pecs according to this. Little do they know women are always going to check out their butts first.
Some people shouldn't breed
At least not until they've had extensive common sense/parenting/how to choose a boyfriend classes. Man charged with biting (a sick) 2-year-old.
'A man charged with biting his girlfriend's 2-year-old boy allegedly told police "it served him right."'
Cheap-ass funerals
In a small town, anyway, this really is how people talk about funerals. I am not joking.
"There is no excuse for such a chintzy affair," Dade said. "Tom was sick for almost a year. Judy's had more than enough time to plan a nice funeral. I do believe she tried her best, though. Some people just don't know better. Really, what can you expect from a woman who doesn't keep her lawn mowed?"
I am shocked to learn that the Onion has moved away from satire to real reporting.
Small town life
One of my favorite people from our gym: a guy who's in his 60s and just comes in to do cardio. He checks his weight/bodyfat on the scale before he works out, then tells everyone what his current bodyfat is. "Today my bodyfat is 23%." Goody!
Happy birthday
Oops
I forgot to add to my carb rant the fact that almost all of the breve drinkers are at least as fat now as they were when they started ordering these things. Minor detail.
Carbohydrate awareness day
I'm late, it was supposed to be today, but why not celebrate another day? I should have a signat work for all those low-carb, Atkins, South Beach freaks who want their BREVES. I mean, 1 cup of half and half has 315 calories and 10.41 g. of carbs, 27.83 g. of fat and only 7.16 g. of protein. These smacktards order 16ers. They have about 12-14 oz. of half-and-half in them, depending on how much foam you put on top. That's about 500 calories! If you just had a latte with skim you'd get no fat, more protein and just slightly more carbs. I've been writing "coronary in a cup" on the steam pitcher.
It's a conspiracy
My son and I were at Borders today and he noticed that, once again, they did not have Soldier of Fortune on the racks. Either people weren't buying it or it's been dropped because of "a liberal conspiracy."
I'm cruel
Where do you find a dog with no legs?
Right where you left him.
Sorry. I'M SORRY, okay?
What I don't understand
about Alexandra Kerry is why she didn't wear some better looking panties. Those were sure ugly. I also liked the Japan Today story which described her dress as "revealing her right shoulder."
Graveyard secrets
via Blog for Insomniacs. A gravestone in Florida was probably belonged to a cow.
The stone bore the dates 1 B.C. and 1921, featured the carved head of a man who looks like he had just sniffed something nasty and was inscribed: "HERE LIES THE CARCASS of J. FULLER GLOOM."
Pottermania
via Bookslut. Compare/contrast Harry Potter and the Left Behind series.
"Liberal Rowling and conservative LeHaye both distrust the government. Harry spends as much time in The Order of Phoenix battling the hapless (or wicked?) Ministry of Magic as he does Voldemort himself. In Left Behind, it's a takeover of world government by the Antichrist that puts the world at peril. In Harry Potter, the adults can't be trusted; in Left Behind, it's the non-Christians."
Potter also makes a cameo in this Village Voice article about Christian fundamentalism, theocracy, Bush, and Israel.
"Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that "the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level"—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter."
Crude stick figure Harry Potter. All of the Philosopher's Stone and some of the Chamber of Secrets. Very funny.
I'm not getting shorter, everyone else is getting taller
My older daughter is now only a fraction of an inch shorter than I am. Not to worry, she said. There will always be people in the world who are shorter than I am. "Like babies and stuff."
But I thought he was dead!
Find out for sure on the Dead People Server. Dead yesterday, Tony Randall, who (I sort of wish I didn't know this) became a first-time father at age 77. Oh well, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao is a great movie.
Zero intelligence, er intolerance, er, tolerance
Just added Our Horrible Children and Zero Intelligence to the links.
Teacher, teacher
Lizzie Borden as a role model. Teacher buys an axe at Home Depot, then
Police say Seaman then returned to the rambling Tudor in the Ramblewood subdivision. She walked into the kitchen and slammed the ax into her husband's head.
Then she dragged her husband's body a short distance into the attached garage and began stabbing him with a knife and smashing him with a sledgehammer, police said.
The next day, Seaman taught her fourth-grade class, and then stopped at Home Depot a second time for cleaning materials to wipe up the mess, police said.
Little bit o'Morrissey fun
Stephin Merritt has a paragraph on Morrissey's latest.
'One longs to lock him up for a year with, say, the pop orchestra the High Llamas, so lyrics like "I've been dreaming of a time when to be English is not to be baneful, to be standing by the flag not feeling shameful, racist or martial" can be matched by equally thoughtful arrangements.'
The subversive Philip Pullman
I'm now reading the Sally Lockhart series, written before His Dark Materials.
"Lady Harborough, assured by her staff that all the guests were ready, was on the platform, making a short speech in which she described the valuable work her hospital fund was doing. It seemed to consist largely of rescuing unmarried mothers from poverty and subjecting them to slavery instead, with the additional disadvantage of being preached at daily by evangelical clergymen."
from Shadow in the North, the second book.
Infomatic
All about Google and why it's not like any old business.
"To generate a stream of new ideas, Google employees are encouraged to devote 20 percent of their time on risky projects that they are personally interested in, but are not tied to their day job."
Old school
I just heard on the radio that Sir Mix-A-Lot will be playing in Eureka soon. My younger daughter might want to go, as one her favorite songs is "Baby got back."
Scratching my head
Childless couple told to try sex.
A clinic spokesman said: "When we asked them how often they had had sex, they looked blank, and said: "What do you mean?".
Small town life
One drawback to living in a small town is the TMI (too much information) factor. You know way more than you want to about some people. My co-worker Mr. T had to tell me that a certain creepy customer never wears any underwear (the guy's girlfriend felt moved to announce it to her coworkers during her shift for some odd reason). Thanks for sharing.
One good thing about teenagers
If you're trying to watch what you eat, you can probably count on the fact that when you want to eat some "forbidden food." it's all gone.
Muscles I never knew I had
My younger daughter was trying to teach me how to flare my nostrils, something she does with ease. "Just flex the muscles in your nostrils, Mom."
Hole in the wall computers
If you haven't read about Sugata Mitra's projects to put computers in public spaces for kids to use, you should. Kids are able to figure out how to use the computers when they are left alone. The fact that they do so isn't as interesting to me as the conditions that make learning happen:
The computer should be in an outdoor, public, and safe location. Children, and often their parents, are apprehensive of enclosed spaces such as closed rooms or "clubs". Locating computers indoors, even inside a school, is associated with regimentation, control, "studying" and other negatives associated with formal schooling. Locating a computer in a school playground, on the other hand, is ideal.
Children should use the computer in heterogeneous groups. Since the MIE process depends on exploration and discovery, working in groups is essential. Collaborative constructivism is the main paradigm of MIE. Children teach each other very effectively and are also effective at self-regulating the process. That is how over 100 children are able to use one computer.
Fitday
I've been using this for a few days to track my eating. It's been helpful in tracking the amounts of protein, carbs, and fats. So much easier than writing everything down and then looking it all up. Plus you can generate cool graphs and stuff.
Annoying (couple) customers of the day
OK, you're in love, in lust, whatever. Everyone is happy for you. But when you're out in public do you have to sing to each other. I mean really, the puke factor is pretty high.
Redecorating
Well, we got a new toilet today. Not very exciting, but necessary.
Butch up
Well, it finally happened. I lifted more than some NANCY BOY at the gym. I finished my bench presses (60# with free weights, this is great for me). When I went into the other room, this guy was pressing 40# on the bench press machine. Yeehah.
The scary thing is that he's one of our local volunteer fire fighters. I hope he never has to carry my fat ass out of a burning building. I mean, I do want to live.
Small town life
"City council considers ban on bovine burials." That's within the city limits only, of course.
Annoying customer of the day
Man orders an "Americano with a shot of espresso." I have to explain that an Americano is a shot of espresso with (yech) hot water. He still had a hard time understanding.
Which hero are you?
Homeric hero, that is. I'm that sneaky jerk, Odysseus.
The horror of middle age
You get up in the morning. When you look at yourself in the bathroom mirror you not only see about 1000 wrinkles, but a zit the size of Mt. Fuji right under your right nostril. Ain't life grand?
Remind me to stay away from
sexually aroused stallions."A sexually excited stallion bit a Polish man to death when he tried to calm the beast, which had become uncontrollably aroused by a nearby mare, police said."
Small town life
The little gym in our little town has a notice posted with rules for sparring. So noone gets beaten to a bloody pulp. Underneath the rules is a definition of sparring. Unfortunately there's a typo and the definition is of "sparing."
Lucky Jim
turns 50. This has got to be one the funniest books I've ever read. I mean tears-streaming-down my face funny. What a great reminder toread it again.
“How close we seem to be tonight, James.”
Death at the cemetery
A man in Arkansas died when his car caught on fire while he was at a cemetery.
"R.V. Davis, 78, had been sitting in the car while his wife, Joy, visited the grave. Joy Davis went back to the car and saw the fire after hearing her husband yelling, but neither she nor a bystander could get him out of the vehicle, said Sgt. Robert D. Rawlinson, a spokesman for the Pine Bluff Police Department.
Joy Davis told police her husband had stayed in the car because he was in poor health and couldn't get out without assistance."
Light up my life
One of my daughters gave me a candle for Mother's Day. It had instructions.
To extinguish the candle, blow out the flame.
Classical coolness
Winged Sandals has animated versions of myths, games and music, bios on gods, mortals, and monsters, and a little background on ancient Greece.
Mother's Day
Geov Parrish talks about the origins of what we now call Mother's Day
"The radical origins of Mother's Day – as a powerful feminist call against war, penned in the wake of the U.S. Civil War in 1870 – are fully compatible with the universal notion of honoring mothers. Women, even more so now, are the primary sufferers of warfare. In the 20th Century, civilian populations bore 90 percent of war's casualties around the world; mass and indiscriminate attacks, popularized in WWII by the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allied firebombings in Japan and Germany, and the rape of Nanjing, are only the most spectacular examples of a phenomenon in which women become the rape and famine victims, the refugees, the forgotten statistics in what are invariably the wars of men."
via feminizm news.
Way before we had Mother's Day, the Greeks honored Rhea, Cronos' wife and sister and mother of Zeus in the Spring. The Romans honored Cybele, and turned it into a big festival.
The most dangerous woman in America
Mother Jones. You can read her Autobiography. Propagandist (Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living) and strategist, she was also a consummate guilt-tripper.
'I stopped speaking and pointing to him I said, "Stop your smiling, young man! Leave this place! Go home and beg the mother who bore you in pain, as the mothers of these little children bore them, go home and beg her to give you brains and a heart."'
Happy Mother's Day
And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see -- or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. --Alice Walker
Annoying customers
Stop touching my hands!
Small town life
T-shirt I saw today on one of those stubbly man-types. "Check out my equipment." Oddly enough, it was printed on the back of his shirt.
Mother's Day
Send Mom an e-mail card. You can choose from some truly awful poems, then choose a musical style like the metal loop they call Momtallica.
I had a grueling day today. Boo-fucking-hoo for me.
Reading
New Bookslut up. Including a review of Tea with Mr. Rochester.
"Men are a thrilling, terrifying enigma to these leading ladies. We are led to infer that this naiveté is not universal, that worldly older sisters and bawdy, sinister servant women have some access to the secrets of the stubbly alien gender, but the prevailing view is a vaguely paranoid reverence for malehood's mysteries."
Stubbly alien gender?
Darn!
Oh, I missed the April entry for the Dullest blog in the world.
Our dead
Mortuary procedures for Dover Air Force Base. The Memory Hole also has photos that were released under the Freedom of Information Act.
PU
My daughter told my son that he was banned from doing the Funky Chicken because his pits smelled so bad. It's true, unfortunately. About the smell, not the banning.
Who's who in Troy
In the film, anyway. The Borders store in Eureka had a big old display of books in the Troy movie theme, including of course,The Siege of Troy. They did have some books by real Greeks too. I guess they thought they could just slip them in and people wouldn't realize they were dreaded "classics."
What's the world coming to?
K, I knew some people (and maybe some barnyard animals) drooling over Rumsfled. But Ashcroft too?
Rummy whipping boy
Oh, dear, Dubya is upset with Rummy.
'Bush is "not satisfied" and "not happy" with the way Rumsfeld informed him about the investigation into abuses by U.S. soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison or the quantity of information Rumsfeld provided, the senior White House official said.'
The lovely diamorphine
The British NHS and prescription heroin.
"Supporters of this policy, such as the independent research group DrugScope, say controlled distribution by the state can drastically reduce crime.
They also argue that clean heroin like diamorphine is not in itself dangerous, just incredibly addictive. And a pharmaceutical prescription excludes all the risks associated with unsafe injecting and enables the user to gradually be weaned off the drug."
Annoying customer(s) of the day
A woman and her son (about 8 or 9) came to the coffee window. He asked if I had any cream-filled donuts left. I said there was only one left, would he like it? Yes. Then his mother asked if I had any more cream-filled donuts left. Well, no.
While I'm getting her coffee, her son says "I'm going to ring your bell. I'm going to ring your bell." Then he rings it. "I rang your bell. I rang your bell." I'd like to ring YOUR bell, kid.
League of pissed off voters
Indyvoter.com. Bringing you How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office.
Madrid Blue
I planted one of
