MemeMachineGo!

What a great toy: the Baconizer links two products according to Amazon’s “people who bought X also bought Y” info.

Pride and Prejudice ====> Faster Pussycat Kill Kill (10 hops):
Pride and Prejudice - By Jane Austen
=====> Emma - By Jane Austen
=====> Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Bantam Classic) - By Thomas Hardy and Robert B. Heilman
=====> Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford World’s Classics) - By Thomas Hardy and Suzanne B. Falck-Yi
=====> Far From the Madding Crowd - With John Schlesinger, Julie Christie, Peter Finch and Alan Bates
=====> Tess - With Roman Polanski, Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth and Leigh Lawson
=====> The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in My Neck - With Roman Polanski, Roman Polanski, Jack MacGowran, Alfie Bass, Jessie Robins and Sharon Tate
=====> Don’t Make Waves - With Alexander Mackendrick
=====> Valley of the Dolls - With Mark Robson, Barbara Parkins and Patty Duke
=====> Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - With Russ Meyer, Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers and Marcia McBroom
=====> Faster Pussycat Kill Kill - With Russ Meyer, Tura Satana and Haji

(Via Obey Your Thrust )

[This was written 5/20, and I neglected to actually post it…]

Thursday morning, running an errand brought me to the Berkeley Y, where I’m a volunteer. Milvia between Allston and Center, where the Berkeley Civic Center is, was cordoned off. A few minutes later, inside the Y, someone was talking about having heard a gunshot or an explosion. When I left the building, I could smell sulfur, and I saw a cop walking away from the Civic Center rolling up detonation wire.

When I got to work, I immediately checked all the local news sources, but didn’t find anything for hours. (The trouble with instant gratification is that it takes so long!)

Here’s the story :

The Berkeley Police Department’s Bomb Squad detonated a suspicious cardboard package on the steps of the Civic Center Thursday after evacuating the first two floors and closing down traffic in front of the building. “The package did not contain anything of note, really, just more folded up cardboard boxes,” police spokesman Mary Kusmiss said after the package was detonated by the bomb squad.

This is something I almost blogged when it was new: Dogs ate my WMDs .

After several years teaching high school, I’ve heard all the excuses. I didn’t get my homework done because my computer crashed, because my project partner didn’t do their part, because I feel sick, because I left it on the bus, because I had a dance recital, because I was abducted by aliens and viciously probed. Houdini doesn’t have as many tricks. No one on earth is more inventive than a high school sophomore backed into a corner and faced with a zero on an assignment. No one, perhaps, except Bush administration officials forced now to account for their astounding claims made since September 2002 regarding Iraq’s alleged weapons program. […] They lied. Period. Trust a teacher on this. We can spot liars who have not done their homework a mile away.

Days after that was published, Bush claimed that looters stole my WMDs .

In his weekly radio address yesterday, Mr Bush was forced to produce a new explanation of why the US has not found Iraq’s alleged chemical and biological weapons. He told listeners that suspect sites had been looted in the closing days of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

It becomes hard not to suspect that they’re not only not even trying, but that they’re going out of their way to make ludicrous excuses just to taunt the minority who care with how much they can get away with.

(See also comments at Scratchings and Making Light .)

Don’t miss this Electrolite entry on U.S. and European societal mythology and other things. No excerpt; just go.

Seems there’s something to all that way to end suffering stuff . Go figure.

Tests carried out in the United States reveal that areas of [Buddhists’ brains] associated with good mood and positive feelings are more active. […] They found that experienced Buddhists, who meditate regularly, were less likely to be shocked, flustered, surprised or as angry compared to other people. Paul Ekman, who carried out the study, said: “The most reasonable hypothesis is that there is something about conscientious Buddhist practice that results in the kind of happiness we all seek.”

So Laura Bush has begun a recurring segment on CBS’ “The Early Show” promoting children’s literacy and including an Early Reader’s Club with a featured book. The first was Book! Book! Book!, which she read from on the show. One of her staffers had bought that copy at A Likely Story, an Alexandria, VA independent bookstore.

To the dismay of independent booksellers, though, the segment promoted Amazon, alone, as where to buy books.

Afterwards, the staffer returned the book to A Likely Story .

(Via Moby Lives )

The Lusty Lady in San Francisco was the first unionized strip joint. Now the dancers have bought the club and it’s the first worker-owned strip joint co-op .

The dancers joined the Service Employees union in 1995. For the most part, they got along with management. A couple of years ago, management decreased their hourly wages, citing reduced profits, and the dancers agreed. Late last year, as they were renegotiating the contract, they demanded that the cuts be restored.
Labor and management reached an agreement on the contract in January. A month later, they received notice that the club would close. That’s when the dancers started to consider the idea of buying the club, and making it employee-owned.

The Tard Blog is an account of adventures in teaching special needs classes.

(Via Cup, Half Full )

As a participant in Boing Boing’s comments notes:

This nation has come a long way from its origins, 227 years ago today, when our rights were being violated by an unelected, mentally deficient, hereditary dictator named George.

Here are a bunch of blogs that link to MMG that I haven’t linked to before. Thanks, everyone — welcome aboard!

• Phoenix
• Douze Lunes
• Cup, Half Full
• Minta
• You Could Do a Lot Worse
• Journal Arcana
• Kaidan
• Arbizu.org
• June’s Tiny Planetoid
• 32 Degrees
• Takoyaki Journals

When I saw the What kind of girlfriend are you? quiz, I took it and gave the answers I guessed Pocahontas would.

The results were:

The perfect girlfriend — mercurial, loving, tomboyish. […] You’re the kind of chick that can hang out with your boyfriend’s friends and be silly. You don’t care about presents or about going to fancy placed [sic]. Hell, just hang out. You’re just happy being around your boyfriend.

(Via Phoenix )

Almost done with my Hugo short fiction reading.

Recently read 20th Century Eightball collecting short pieces from Dan Clowes’ Eightball. Some of them fed into the “Ghost World” movie; some are inspired; some are just odd. Also read The Wraith by Michael T. Gilbert, collecting an early series by the creator of Mr. Monster, a favorite of mine. It was fun, if sleight.

Like manna from heaven, one occasionally finds abandoned books lying in boxes on Berkeley sidewalks. Most of the time most of them are crap — things their owners rightly judged would be of no interest to any of the used bookstores around town. But sometimes there are gems. One such I found recently was Lies My Teacher Told Me which I’ve meant to get to since it came out eight years ago. And it’s a great read — compelling, subversive, interesting and fun. I’ll try to comment more when I’m done.

A lot of people had my idea of stalking the public library when it came to Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Mine was in the neighborhood of the 50th or 60th hold placed. But given that among the five branches of the Berkeley Public Library, 35 copies were ordered, that wasn’t doing so badly. I happened to check my patron info online on Saturday, found it was waiting for me, and picked it up.

I’m about 250 pages into it. Were it any of the first three books, I’d be almost done. It being this one, I’m not even all that close to a third done. I’m enjoying myself; again, will comment further when done.

I’ve also begun Heroes and Monsters: the Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as well as reading Alan Moore’s scripts for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as published in the two-volume slipcased “absolute edition” (I’m so weak), and continuing to read Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman.

Ah, to have time enough for books.

In what could be a blow to a commonplace method of space travel in recent decades’ sf, a scientist is arguing that solar sails can’t work :

The next generation of spacecraft propulsion systems could be dead in the water before they are even launched. A physicist is claiming that solar sailing - the idea of using sunlight to blow spacecraft across the solar system - is at odds with the laws of thermal physics. […] Thomas Gold from Cornell University in New York says the proponents of solar sailing have forgotten about thermodynamics.

I’ve always suspected that more of their popularity in sf owed to the romantic appeal of invoking images of sailing ships than to their practicality. But given that they’re being developed in the real world, maybe that was unfair.

My father asked: “Why did I have to read about this on CNN and not your blog?” The Sonkajarvi Wife Carrying World Championship was last week.

• The length of the official track is 253.5 meters, and the surface of the track is partially sand and partially grass
• The track has two dry obstacles and a water obstacle, about one meter deep
• The wife to be carried may be your own, the neighbour’s or you may have found her farther afield; she must, however, be over 17 years of age
• The minimum weight of the wife to be carried is 49 kilos. If it is less than 49 kilos, the wife will be burdened with such a heavy rucksack that the total weight to be carried is 49 kilos.
• All the participants must have fun
• The winner is the couple who completes the course in the shortest time
• If a contestant drops his wife that couple will be fined 15 seconds per drop

Charlie installs some of the latest Linux distributions and says the revolution’s over :

Quick impressions: very slick. The latest SuSE and Red Hat distros are easier to install than any Windows version I’ve seen, and no harder than Mac OS/X 10.2 (Jaguar). When you get to the turn-it-on experience you’re confronted — assuming you have reasonably standard hardware — with something that looks not unlike Windows XP. […] And the stuff just works. […] Bluntly, it’s just not exciting any more.

I’m off to Readercon to generally be a fanboy at Howard Waldrop’s feet. I’ll be back Tuesday. Carry on and visit all the fine folks in my blogroll (Hey! Skimble ‘s back!)

Alan Moore gets snarky about LXG :

But what does he think of the decision to add Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde’s eternally youthful anti-hero) and Sawyer? ‘What can you do with Dorian Gray, other than say ‘Oh, hello Dorian, you’re looking good’?’ he scoffs. ‘He’s just somebody that’s got Botox a century before everyone else. That’s about as much use as he is.

(Via LinkMachineGo )

Mortgage rates rise to 3-month high :

It took 54 words for Alan Greenspan to send mortgage rates skyward. When Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, went to Congress Tuesday to deliver his semiannual economic report, mortgage rates had been tranquil for a week, edging downward slightly. Minutes after Greenspan opened his mouth, long-term rates blasted off the launch pad. The benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose 22 basis points to 5.83 percent, according to the Bankrate.com national survey of large lenders.

I am so sorry for boring you all with this, but it his deep, personal importance to me right now.

In a Saturday Night Live skit, Mike Myers played Middle-Aged Man, who suddenly appeared in the bedroom of a couple where the man had just had an episode of impotence. Middle-Aged Man began dispensing advice. The man, resentful, said “You know what I think, Middle-Aged Man? I think it’s been so long since you had any, you can’t even remember what it’s like.”

“Maybe,” Middle-Aged Man replied. “But I know how escrow works.”

And, well, now I know how escrow works.

Pocahontas and I are scheduled to close on a house at the end of July, a different house than I talked about before . It’s very nice: three bedrooms, a garage, a basement, hardwood floors, a great kitchen. It’s spacious enough that there’s no reason to expect to outgrow it. I’m very excited about it.

And we’re getting very deeply into debt, and I very much preferred the rate we had locked in for the previous house to what we could get now.

Ah, well. Rates’re still much better than they’ve been at many points in the past 20 years…

In days of yore, geeks who wanted to show off their bad attitudes would include an X-NSA-Fodder mail-header in their email, including things like “mossad terrorism CIA cocaine bomb.” The nominal premise was that if everyone did it, it would be impossible to usefully automatically filter email, so the Three Letter Agencies would be forced to give up. But I don’t think anyone really believed that the TLAs had any interest in their email, nor that anyone would seriously suggest there was any actual value in extending bait so explicitly marked.

Nonetheless, this has been updated and carried to an absurd degree: the Supervillianizer conspiracy client allows you to create a villain with a Swiss email address, who then automatically exchanges email with other villains and together they form conspiracy networks

Swiss law requires ISPs to store all email for 6 months, and I think we all think the Three Letter Agencies and police have an interest in reading email today.

Even neo-Nazis and Jewish extremists can set aside their differences and work together toward a common goal… when the goal is hating Muslims .

French neo-Nazis formed an alliance with extremist Jewish groups on the Internet to publish a torrent of hate messages directed against Arabs and Muslims, according to a report by a leading anti-racist group.

Imagine this sequence of events. A man reads a story in a Tampa free weekly paper called “Weapons of Mass Stupidity”, critical of Fox News. He makes a printout and passes it on to his son, a dark bearded man. His son reads it while on line in a coffee house. A concerned citizen makes a call to the FBI reporting someone reading “seditious literature.” What would the FBI do?

A) Laugh their asses off that it’s supposed to be worth their while to chase tips about men in coffeehouses reading essays

B) Send two agents to question him and search his car

Feel safer yet?

(Via MeFi )

A crystal meth-maker has been accused of two counts of manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon .

“This is a two-edged sword,” [district attorney] Wilson said. “Not only is the drug methamphetamine in itself a threat to both society and those using it, but the toxic compounds and deadly gases created as side products are also real threats.”

Ooh ooh ooh! Can we arrest the car manufacturers next?

As those who know me or read MMG exceptionally closely know, I have long hair. Recently it had gotten down to my waist; its weight was enough to be annoying; I was frequently lying on it in bed.

It was time to get it cut.

Locks of Love is a charity that accepts donations of hair to make wigs to donate to children undergoing chemotherapy; the minimum donation they accept is 10”. I did this once before, a few years ago, and had to spend several minutes in a a cheap haircut place trying to explain the concept to a hair cutter who was less than fluent in English. And had to pay for a few minutes’ work: cutting along the line and neatening the remains. And had to pay to mail it in. This time I thought it’d be less bother to make the trip to Concord to the only place in the Bay Area that does Locks of Love haircuts for free . No explanation; it was free; they mailed it in; easy!

Ten inches doesn’t sound like much relative to waist-length hair, but it is. There’s scarcely enough left to seem worth braiding. To play with my hair, I have to reach all the way up to my shoulder. The first time I brushed it out, the stroke ended so soon, the brush flew out of my hand. Then I did it again.

Ah well. In another 18 months or so, it’ll be back to normal.

Canadian cattle ranchers are saying that unless people buy more beef, they’ll be forced to kill cows.

Alberta’s beef industry is getting so desperate that some feedlot owners say the only solution to the mad cow stalemate might be to round up cattle, throw them into a big pit and shoot them. Such a graphic, bloody scene may persuade consumers, grocery stores and fast-food chains to help the troubled industry move Canadian cattle through the marketplace more quickly, said Rick Paskal, a feedlot owner with 35,000 head of cattle in Picture Butte, Alta.

Canadian animal lovers, act quickly. Only you can spare them this fate.

(Via Meat Facts )

Maybe Logic , the documentary on Robert Anton Wilson that I’ve mentioned before is finally here.

The premiere is tomorrow night in Santa Cruz. RAW will be speaking, and I’ll be there.

New World Ancestors Lose 12,000 Years

Scientists studying the genetic signatures of Siberians and American Indians have found evidence that the first human migrations to the New World from Siberia probably occurred no earlier than 18,000 years ago. The new estimate undermines arguments for colonization as far back as 30,000 years ago, but reinforces archaeological findings and a linguistic theory that most American languages belong to a single family called Amerind.

I read an article on the web some time ago, and I can’t find it to link to. It suggested imagining a supposedly free election in which one party controlled the voting process, carried the ballots off to count in private, announced the winners, and destroyed the ballots. Sounds like the sort of perversion of democracy you’d find in a communist totalitarion state, right? Or what we’ve got here in the U.S. with Republican-owned companies making the electronic voting machines.

Something is rotten in the state of Nebraska

Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it’s true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. […] U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska. […] Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska. […] His hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel “was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska.” What Hagel’s website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.

The Times notices a problem

The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday. “We found some stunning, stunning flaws,” said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States.

But…

They’re barking up the wrong tree anyway. How can a machine-produced vote ever constitute a legal vote? Isn’t it merely circumstantial evidence of a vote produced by a machine that may or may not have been cast by a voter? In Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court said, “A legal vote is one in which there is a ‘clear indication of the intent of the voter.’”

Voting machines reflect the action of the machine first and the intent of the voter …maybe. When machines are in the voting booth three violations of federal law take place:

1. inability to observe if voting machines properly register votes
2. inability to observe if voting machines properly count votes
3. inability to enforce the Voting Rights Act, because of the inability to observe if voting machines are properly registering or counting votes

We’ve got some serious problems in this country, but none more serious than this. If the elections are fixed, it’s simply game over for democracy. If it’s not already too late, we desperately need laws requiring any voting machines produce hard-copy ballots that are at least in principle verifiable.

Julia Rose , a singer and fitness buff, has been banned from performing at the Fredericksburg, VA Borders .

[She] told a Fredericksburg Borders audience Friday: “George Bush has chicken legs. He needs to pump some iron.” “I never bashed Bush as president. I merely said his lower body needs some serious definition,” Rose explained later. She said most of the audience laughed. But a few were offended and reportedly contacted Amy Korsun, area marketing manager for Borders Books & Music, to complain about Rose making “political” comments.

Well, like the identity politics crowd says, the personal is the political.

(Via Obscure Store )

Defective Yeti presents a team building exercise

Hetrosexual Female Buddy: Hey, your [female] friend S. is really cute.

Me: Yep. She’s single, too, in case you ever decide to switch teams.

HFB: Really? Hmmmmm. [Ponders] Wait a minute: has she switched teams?

Me: Ah, no. So you’d also have to talk her into that.

HFB: Ummmmmm … yeah, that sounds like too much work. But thanks, though.

Hunh. Seems there’s going to be a new Heinlein novel .

For Us, the Living , the first novel Robert A. Heinlein wrote, has been sold to Scribner’s and Pocket Books. All copies of the novel, which is believed to have been written between late 1938 and April 1939, were thought to have been lost or destroyed, but a copy was located recently and passed on to the Heinlein Society, which turned it over to Heinlein’s literary estate, and which subsequently sold at auction. No publication date has yet been announced.

Well, Pocahontas and I should close on our house this week. In an ideal world, we’ll be moving next weekend; it is not likely that we live in an ideal world. At any rate, my life is packing, sorting, purging, packing. Soon I’ll be turning off the DSL line. Blogging is apt to be very sketchy for the next three weeks. Talk amongst yourselves.

A grad student mapped the U.S.’s fiber optic infrastructure :

Sean Gorman’s professor called his dissertation “tedious and unimportant.” Gorman didn’t talk about it when he went on dates because “it was so boring they’d start staring up at the ceiling.” But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman’s work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives — if they could get their hands on it — would find a terrorist treasure map.

What I find most striking is this:

Invariably, he said, they [the gov’t officials he’s been talking with] suggest his work be classified. […] “He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade — and then they both should burn it,” said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. […] Gorman compiled his mega-map using publicly available material he found on the Internet. None of it was classified.

What we’re dealing with here is a far more general problem of life in an open society. Classifying his dissertation is shutting the barn door after the cow’s gone. It’d no doubt make people feel better; I imagine so would their sticking their fingers in their ears and saying “la la la! I can’t hear you!” if one tried to point out that what one grad student can do, so can another.

(Thanks, Dad)

On this MeFi discussion of TV 411 , described as Sesame Street for Grown-ups , one poster suggests:

“Hey, Bert! How come you’re filing as head-of-household, and I have to file as single?”

“Well, you see, Ernie, I’ve got all these pigeons as dependents, and you’ve just got the one rubber duckie. It only makes economic sense to aggregate our household income to my return and offset all my deductions there, which generates the lowest tax possible. You are still able to take a standard deduction for a single individual, which exceeds the deductions you would otherwise have on account of the duckie.”

“Gee, Bert! You’re smart!”

…to which another adds “Because until we move to Canada we can’t file as a married couple, Ernie.”

Salon covers the college Republican convention :

“As conservatives, we don’t hate America,” Erickson told his young audience. “The life of a liberal is hell. It is not possible to have a debate, a discussion, with someone who at their root, at their core, hates everything this country stands for but doesn’t hate it enough to leave.” Erickson was followed by Jack Abramoff, a powerful right-wing lobbyist and former College Republican chairman, who exhorted the next generation to fight hard, lest “the ascension of evil, the bad guys, the Bolsheviks, the Democrats return.” That equation — evil = communist = Democrats — was nearly axiomatic at the convention. Ann Coulter’s latest book, “Treason,” which tarred virtually all Democrats as traitors, may have been denounced by conservative intellectuals, but its message has pervaded the party. Gene McDonald, who sold “No Muslims = No Terrorists” bumper stickers at the Conservative Political Action Conference in January, was doing a brisk trade in “Bring Back the Blacklist” T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads.

Sometimes I wonder if this country has a chance with such unbridgable gulfs between different factions’ pictures of what it should be.

The U.S. army, kidnappers :

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If you want your family released, turn yourself in.” Such tactics are justified, he said, because, “It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.” They would have been released in due course, he added later. The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered.

Doh!

Global warming, which most climate experts blame mainly on large-scale burning of oil and other fossil fuels, is interfering with efforts in Alaska to discover yet more oil.

There is nothing I could possibly add.

(Via MeFi )