MemeMachineGo!

=v= Next week in San Francisco, there's a runoff election between the Democratic and Green candidates for mayor. The Democrat, Gavin Newsom, has Al Gore coming to town. And, apparently, orchestrating a phony anti-Gore protest.

Greens received email to gather at Zeitgeist (a biker bar, as in bicyclist, as in, "Hey, that's my bar, dammit!") and protest Al Gore. The IP address of the email turned out to be from the Newsom campaign, though.

The Green, Matt Gonzalez, put out a press release about the incident:

The "Al Gore protest" email attempts to position the Green Party, and by association, Gonzalez, as politically power hungry: "The Green Party is the new power in San Francisco. We elected Matt Gonzalez President of the Board of Supervisors and will elect him Mayor on December 9."

"I didn't think it could get any more bizarre and unseemly than Endorsementgate with Angela Alioto. But the Newsom campaign managed to top even that scandal by trying to orchestrate a protest against their own political event," said Supervisor Aaron Peskin.

How I miss San Francisco politics. I'm just waiting for Newsom to get hit by another pie. (Probably one from his own campaign, attempting to garner some sympathy.)

Defective yeti flies cheap :

They didn’t even have meals on the flights — you had to buy your own $9 ham sandwich at the airport commissary and bring it on board with you. During the preflight instructions I expected the stewardess to say that, in the event of a sudden depressurization of the cabin, an air mask would drop from the overhead compartment, and all you would need to do is swipe a major credit card through the reader in your armrest to purchase 3 minutes of oxygen for only $10.

One of the reasons I haven’t been posting much of late is because I haven’t been doing much random web-searching. Hacking has been of interest to me of late, so I’ve been spending a lot of my time on-line reading up on an assortment of technical issues. But I don’t want to turn MMG! into a tech blog, so I haven’t been sharing (well, not much ), despite how fun I’ve been finding it.

This year, like the past three years, the London Perl Mongers have been making a Perl Advent Calendar . For each day of December through the 25th, one can select a new box on the calendar and get a short tutorial on a different Perl module. I’ve been visiting daily since the first of the month.

I was amused that Electrolite picked it up, and Boing Boing from there. I don’t think PNH or Cory are all that interested in boning up on the CPAN .

But, of course, it is such good geeky fun that a lot of people can take pleasure in the fact that it exists even without wanting to read 25 days of Perl documentation. But it never occurred to me to post it here… I’m too close to tech stuff now — I’ve lost perspective on what could be worth sharing without running the risk of making MMG! unreadable to anyone without my precise technical interests.

It’s a good thing the Chinese gave up mutilating females’ feet in the name of beauty in 1911.

The practice of foot binding began in the Sung dynasty (960-976 BC), reportedly to imitate an imperial concubine who was required to dance with her feet bound. By the 12th century, the practice was widespread and more severe — girls’ feet were bound so tightly and early in life that they were unable to dance and had difficulty walking. By the time a girl turned three years old, all her toes but the first were broken, and her feet were bound tightly with cloth strips to keep her feet from growing larger than 10 cm, about 3.9 inches.

Too bad modern America has taken it up .

With vanity always in fashion and shoes reaching iconic cultural status, women are having parts of their toes lopped off to fit into the latest Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Cheerful how-to stories about these operations have appeared in women’s magazines and major newspapers and on television news programs.

Hey, at least it’s voluntary.

(Second link via Follow Me Here )

Nebraska Atheists cites discrimination against atheists in seven state constitutions , like the Tennessee Constitution , Article 9, Section 2:

No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.

I’ve always had a hard time even taking seriously the shibboleth about people’s supposed inability to act civilly without a belief in heaven and hell, and never suspected it was taken for granted in a U.S. state constitution (let alone two of them ).

(I’ll note that their citation of the Massachusetts Constitution is outdated… the specified article has been superseded… with which an atheist could still find objection.)

(Via Discordian Research Technology News )

Things have been uneventful in the blog, ‘cause they’ve been eventful in life.

On Monday, I was laid off — the tech slowdown finally caught up with me.

On Tuesday, I proposed to Pocahontas. We knew we were going to get married at some point; putting me on her insurance so we didn’t have to pay for COBRA while I’m unemployed inspired the timing.

Not giving me any chance to change my mind, she researched civil ceremonies on the web that night, and Wednesday morning we were married at the Alameda County Clerk’s office in Oakland, following an engagement of some twelve hours.

If the U.S. had socialized medicine, we probably wouldn’t be married now, so don’t be saying the Republicans don’t promote family values.

Another reminder that, yeah, this is the 21st century .

It’s bad news, says your doctor. Your liver is failing. So he extracts stem cells from your bone marrow and injects them into a sheep fetus while it is still in the womb. When the sheep is born, much of the animal’s liver will consist of your own cells - ready to be harvested and given back to you.

The described procedure is still vaporware, but steps are being taken toward it.

(So drink more and invest in sheep futures.)

I’m currently interviewing, and don’t plan to take Defective Yeti’s interview advice .

Wonder how many other towns’ newspapers had this on their front pages?

Toadfish’s steamy love life is revealed
Singing fish sometimes let meek males join a menage a trois

When Pocahontas and I bought our house, and I became a member of the landed gentry, I joked with friends about my new attitude: “Up with The Man! Support the status quo!”

Well, somebody out there takes the possibility of such transitions seriously.

Tonight I received at my house some junk mail. Standard boilerplate. Your membership card enclosed. Renew now. Fight as I do to keep junk mail at bay, I’ve donated to enough charities and activist organizations to get a lot of these. Like the song goes, “A Liberal Is Never Lonely.” Except I’ve never counted myself as a liberal, per se (and still don’t, despite my recent registration as a Democrat.) And I can’t find a single reference to a song by that name, or containing that line, on Google, so I’m probably remembering it wrong. But I digress.

Like a good violent, paranoid computer geek, I consider it in my best interest to keep my physical address on a need to know basis. So I’ve kept the Berkeley PO box I’ve had for the past seven years or so. But like a bad violent, paranoid computer geek, I took a few weeks to get around to opting out of my mortgage-holder’s selling my address, so I’ve been receiving a bunch of junk mail at my home, much of it “Welcome to the Neighborhood!” or “New Homeowner” themed.

And this particular piece of junk mail was from the GOP, soliciting funds for Bush’s re-election campaign.

It had the standard rhetoric. Country at a precipitous junction. Shall we maintain President [sic] Bush’s practical foreign policies, and his saving education, protecting social security, etc., etc.? War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. We have always been at war with Eurasia. Big brother has increased the chocolate ration to 20 grams a day. Or will we follow the Democrats’ plans of raising taxes and big spending?

I know this is stupid, but I felt physically ill about the presumption I could believe their stupid lies and support their candidate, even one resulting from an automated process.

I didn’t finish the letter. I tore it up, cut up the card, and sent it back to them in their postage-paid return envelope. A pretty futile gesture, but the postage’ll take something like a quarter out of their coffers, and it made me feel better.

=v= I love the Brooklyn Bridge. It's got a nice wooden boardwalk to bike on, gothic architecture, a bunch of nifty cables to look at, and a view of two cities. Plus, when I need some extra spending cash, I can sell it to tourists.

Today, though, it's another Brooklyn-to-Manhattan bridge that's in the spotlight. Today, the Williamsburg Bridge turns 100. The New York Times has marked the occasion by giving Op-Ed space to the great David Macaulay, who of course provides a nice cut-out model of the bridge. Hours of fun!

All is not sweetness and light, though. Biker and blogger Lisa Whiteman broke some bones and teeth on one of the bridge's notorious expansion joints. Y'know, many of us have swallowed the liberal media myth that nonagenarians and centenarians are harmless, but this is no little old bridge from Pasadena. I mean, it's got hu-u-uge, sharp ... Look at the bones!

I’m currently reading Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely.

Twists, Slugs, and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang is proving an invaluable resource.

Much has been written about the golden ratio in art and architecture and music .

Has anyone sought it in fiction? I can see it now… if your Act I climax is on p. 25, then your Act II climax must be on p. 65.

I’m on vacation from blogging for the next week. Yeah, I know one would be hard-pressed to distinguish this from the rest of the month.

Happy Solstice, Xmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, or whatever it is you do or don’t do.