MemeMachineGo!

Defective Yeti describes a Xmas ER visit in I’ll be prone for Christmas . Hilarity ensues.

I’m sick of linking to Defective Yeti entries. Just read it yourself, ok?

Reason magazine gives props to Robert Anton Wilson .

“Around 1973 I became convinced for a while that I was receiving messages from outer space,” he informs us in Maybe Logic. “But then a psychic reader told me that I was actually channeling an ancient Chinese philosopher. And another psychic reader told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. And at that time I started reading neurology and I decided it was just my right brain talking to my left brain. And then I went to Ireland and discovered it was actually a six-foot-tall white rabbit — they call it the pooka.” A little later he comments, “I like the giant rabbit from County Kerry because there’s no chance anyone will take that literally.”

Updated: Fixed link. Thanks, Dan .

(Via The 18½ Minute Gap)

=v= Back when the web was young, the peta.org domain was snapped up by an individual who set up a "People Eating Tasty Animals" website. P.E.T.A. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) invoked trademark law and now owns the domain.

Payback time: in the wake of Mad Cow Disease hitting these shores again, P.E.T.A. has set up BEEF.com to suggest one way to avoid it. This is easily confusable with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association's BEEF.org, and while they might reasonably be said to have a beef with PETA, they don't have a trademark issue. (BEEF.com is only up for a limited time, though. The domain's owner is holding out for a higher bidder before giving it up permanently.)

=v= As Martha Stewart heads to trial, the Ayn Rand Institute, which admires her high standards, sent out a press release this week in her defense:

These ugly and vicious attacks against Martha Stewart ... are not isolated events, but part of a large and dangerous trend in America: the culturally-sanctioned envy and hatred of successful people.

I actually agree to some extent, though of course this sidesteps the whole matter of whether insider trading is the sort of thing a reasonable heroic individual would do. As opposed to, say, cashing in by withholding the truth from others.

Speaking of high standards, the press release is almost identical to one they wrote nearly two years ago. But of course, the argument made was surely the epitome of reason when it was written, so there's no need for them to change a word. A=A.

(Via the perpetrator of Creek Running North)

A history of coffeehouses :

Far more controversial than the coffee-houses’ functions as centres of scientific, literary and business exchange, however, was their potential as centres of political dissent. Coffee’s reputation as a seditious beverage goes back at least as far as 1511, the date of the first known attempt to ban the consumption of coffee, in Mecca. […] It was at the Café de Foy, eyed by police spies while standing on a table brandishing two pistols, that Camille Desmoulins roused his countrymen with his historic appeal—“Aux armes, citoyens!”—on July 12th 1789. The Bastille fell two days later, and the French revolution had begun. Jules Michelet, a French historian, subsequently noted that those “who assembled day after day in the Café de Procope saw, with penetrating glance, in the depths of their black drink, the illumination of the year of the revolution.”

So, like, with a Starbucks on every corner, the world should be abuzz with radical thinking, right? Right?

(Via Follow Me Here )

Author Poppy Z. Brite found a LiveJournal community inspired, among other things, by her work. Responding to someone who described her work thusly: “insipid boy-love novels in which all the characters are annoyingly normal”, she wrote:

I would like to respond to a rather snarky comment below by saying that if you think the characters in THE VALUE OF X are normal, I can’t help thinking you have a great deal to learn about normalcy. True, they don’t have funny-colored hair or body piercings, they don’t wear makeup, they don’t Worship The Night. I think part of growing up, though, is realizing that a great many people who exhibit these characteristics are in fact excruciatingly normal — or at least as “normal” as anyone is — while a lot of people who don’t feel the need to parade their differences are in fact unusual and interesting folks. Not that there’s anything wrong with parading one’s differences, but I don’t care for communities where it is a requirement.

…and she was banned from posting there.

(Via Boing Boing )

Jon Carroll asks a good question — why do we think our income is so disposable?

Now, you know you are being ripped off. You know that. You even say it to your friends. Almost all of us play the game. Usually we don’t talk about it, but we don’t kid ourselves, either. We spend too much money. It’s hard not to. We live in a culture where buying consumer goods is almost a patriotic duty, where people are defined by the stuff they own, where people “deserve” a diamond or a vacation or a night on the town. […] Did you find the fun you were seeking?

(Via Cogito Ergo Sumana )

Microsoft’s lawyers either think people are stupid enough to confuse mikerowesoft.com , the website of a Canadian high school student named (wait for it) Mike Rowe, with a Microsoft site:

It took a while for Microsoft to come after Mike Rowe Soft, but on Nov. 19, Rowe got an e-mail from law firm Smart & Biggar, claiming he was infringing copyright and demanding that he transfer his domain name to Microsoft. […] Customers of Microsoft could also be confused by the mikerowsoft Web page, the letter said.

or maybe they’re just really, really desperate to justify to MSFT the value of retaining them .

(Via MeFi )

Snarkout has a great article on the Voynich Manuscript , a mysterious document of unknown providence. It resembles a prior day Codex Seraphinianus , with illustrations of unknown plants, astrological charts, nsked people, and extensive handwritten text in an unknown alphabet and language.

It has never been deciphered, and many have thought it was hoax, with John Dee’s accomplice, Edward Kelly as a popular suspect. A researcher has bolstered this theory by demonstrating how it could have been generated with known Elizabethan era text-munging techniques , with these results .

I read something very disturbing this morning. It seems that some Walmarts lock their employees in at night, without anyone on the premises having the key , and with the warning that they’ll be fired if they use the fire escape in any event other than a fire. And there have been several cases of people being injured, but waiting hours to seek medical attention for fear of losing their jobs.

But that’s not the disturbing part.

In the ensuing Metafilter discussion , there are several blame-the-employees perspectives offered, including the theory that this proves that poor people are stupid and deserve to be treated like shit.

You probably think I’m exaggerating. I would in your shoes. So; :

These are adults. They have some level of responsibility for themselves. If they’ve got broken bones or are having possible heart attacks, then they’ve got to take the initiative to attend to their problems in the best way that they can and if they lose their $6 an hour job, that’s not a worse fate than an ankle that ends up requiring pins because it was walked around on for several hours with a fracture or dying from an ignored heart attack. […] When you put your crap job above the fact that you’ve been hit by a friggin forklift and need medical attention, what do you want to be told? There was an option for these workers and they didn’t take it. Of course, it could be that the reason why they’re working one of the crappiest jobs on earth is because they don’t have the capacity for independent reasoning and can’t realize that personal health and safety are priority issues, but I don’t know why that’s anyone else’s fault.

Because, of course, there are always so many jobs available that one’s loss of a job could never mean the difference between housing and feeding your family and not. So there couldn’t possibly be anything rational about being so desperate to keep your job that the cost-benefit analysis favored suffering for a few hours over being unemployed when your ability to seek jobs and what jobs you could accept are impaired by your injury. Nope, gotta be stupidity.

Years ago, I ordered a glow-in-the-dark squid from Archie McPhee . Unfortunately, it seems they no longer offer it — today their only squids are cocktail squids , though they do offer another glow-in-the-dark cephalopod .

But happily, Mother Nature has glow squids in stock !

A nocturnal squid that cruises the ocean around Hawaii for prey and mates uses a built-in flashlight to hide its shadow from predatory fish on the seafloor. The unique light organ found in the Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymma scolopes) is composed of stacks of silvery reflector plates called reflectins that surround colonies of luminescent, symbiotic bacteria.

Da Vinci’s Notebook is a hysterically funny a capella group. One of their songs (mp3 ) starts out with a man singin’ the blues and makes the transition to the rousing refrain:

I take a look at my enormous penis
And my troubles start a-meltin’ away.

A Calgary station played the song, and a listener complained it was obscene. Once again, Canada demonstrated how to be mellow .

The listener’s complaint that the song was obscene fell flat before the [Canadian Broadcast Standards] council’s members, who said on Friday the item did not break its code of ethics. “The discussion of penis size is not in and of itself sufficiently unequivocally a sexual matter that it can be said to be in breach of the code,” the council said.

Y’know, I do believe that Greg Palast is getting just a wee bit peeved .

Deep into your State of the Siege lecture tonight, long after sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, you came after our children. “By passing the No Child Left Behind Act,” you said, “We are regularly testing every child … and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing.” […] You’ve ordered this testing to hunt down, identify and target for destruction the hopes of millions of children you find too expensive, too heavy a burden, to educate. […]

Once the kids are stamped and sorted, the parents of the marked children ask for you to fill your tantalizing promise, to “make sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”

But there is no “better option,” is there, Mr. Bush? Where’s the money for the better schools to take in the kids getting crushed in cash-poor districts? Where’s the open door to the suburban campuses with the big green lawns for the dark kids with the test-score mark of Cain.

And if I bring up the race of the kids with the low score, don’t get all snippy with me, telling me your program is color blind. We know the color of the kids left behind; and it’s not the color of the kids you went to school with at Philips Andover Academy.

You know and I know that the testing is a con. There is no “better option” at the other end. The cash went to the end the inheritance tax, that special program to give every millionaire’s son another million.

But you’ll tell me, you took tests as a youth. I know you did. And you scored on the Air Guard flight test 25 out of 100, one point above too dumb to fly. But you zoomed past the other would-be flyboys. They were stamped, “Ready for ‘Nam.” And you took a test to get into Yale. And though your pet rock scored a wee bit higher than you, your grandpa on the Yale board provided the “better option” which got you in. […]

You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program - because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: Identify the nation’s loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap. The system will provide the new worker drones that will clean the toilets at the Yale alumni club, to punch the McDonald’s cash registers color-coded for illiterates, to pamper the winner-class on the higher floors of the new service economy order.

(Via Follow Me Here )

Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities? Processed cheese food snack product.

Maybe you heard about the American Family Association , who last month began an on-line poll on homosexual marriage, saying “Results of this poll will be presented to Congress.”

Well, they changed their minds .

As of Jan. 19, 60 percent of respondents — more than 508,000 voters — said, “I favor legalization of homosexual marriage.” With an additional 7.89 percent — or 66,732 voters — replying, “I favor a ‘civil union’ with the full benefits of marriage except for the name,” the AFA’s chosen position, “I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and ‘civil unions,’” was being defeated by a 2-1 ratio.

“We’re very concerned that the traditional state of marriage is under threat in our country by homosexual activists,” said AFA representative Buddy Smith. “It just so happens that homosexual activist groups around the country got a hold of the poll — it was forwarded to them — and they decided to have a little fun, and turn their organizations around the country (onto) the poll to try to cause it to represent something other than what we wanted it to. And so far, they succeeded with that.”

Of course, no such poll can be said to represent an accurate picture of popular opinion. But, clearly, the AFA had hoped Congress would take the numbers it planned to produce as exactly that kind of evidence.

Now, Smith says, his organization has had to abandon its goal of taking the poll to Capitol Hill.

“We made the decision early on not to do that,” Smith admitted, “because of how, as I say, the homosexual activists around the country have done their number on it.”

Naturally, had anti-homosexual activists (like, say, the AFA) succeeded in getting the numbers they wanted then the poll would have been proudly presented to Congress as representing the will of the American people.

What a great idea. Twin Cities coffeehouses rated for writers . Why, someone should do the same for the East Bay.

(Via Beautiful Stuff )

A friend of mine has this bumper sticker: “We’ve got enough youth. How about a fountain of smart?”

Popular Science offers a hodgepodge of tips to develop mental muscles of steel .

And a new study emphasizes that one important part would be getting enough sleep .

(Via Follow Me Here and Boing Boing )

How refusing visas to foreign grad students and researchers, blocking stem-cell research, and privileging 19th century industries over 21st are creating a creative brain drain away from the U.S.

We came up with these new technologies and ideas largely because we were able to energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world. Talented, educated immigrants and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions. These areas became hothouses of innovation, the modern-day equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists, artists, designers, engineers, financiers, marketers, and sundry entrepreneurs fed off each other’s knowledge, energy, and capital to make new products, new services, and whole new industries: cutting-edge entertainment in southern California, new financial instruments in New York, computer products in northern California and Austin, satellites and telecommunications in Washington, D.C., software and innovative retail in Seattle, biotechnology in Boston. […]

But now the rest of the world has taken notice of our success and is trying to copy it. The present surge of outsourcing is the first step—or if you will, the first pincer of the claw. The more routinizable aspects of what we consider brainwork—writing computer code, analyzing X-rays—are being lured away by countries like India and Romania, which have lower labor costs and educated workforces large enough to do the job. Though alarming and disruptive, such outsourcing might be manageable if we could substitute a new tier of jobs derived from the new technologies and ideas coming out of our creative centers. But so far in this economic recovery, that hasn’t happened.

What should really alarm us is that our capacity to so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition—the other pincer of the claw—as cities in other developed countries transform themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They’re doing it through a variety of means—from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they’re luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States’ province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas. The most advanced cell phones are being made in Salo, Finland, not Chicago. The world’s leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle.

I know I’m applying for Irish citizenship .

(Via The Null Device )

I’ve never talked about it here much, but I work out on a regular basis. It’s an important part of my life. I’m in pretty good shape.

This dude makes me feel like a total couch potato.

A blaring car horn shook Dean Karnazes awake. His eyes snapped open to see two headlights coming straight at him in the middle of a two-lane highway in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He was completely confused. Where am I? he asked himself. What in the world is going on? Whatever it was, it seemed dangerous as hell. A split second later, he hurled himself into the brush on the road’s shoulder.

By the light of the full moon, Karnazes checked his watch — 3:30 a.m. He finally realized what had happened. He’d fallen asleep while running and veered into the center of the highway. Shakily, he stood up.

Karnazes was near the end of the 2002 Providian Relay, a 199-mile footrace from Napa to Santa Cruz that’s normally run by teams of 12 people. But as he had for the past seven years, Karnazes was running the entire course by himself, as what he wryly calls “Team Dean.” When the horn jolted him awake, he’d been running for more than 50 hours, without sleep, and had covered 160 miles.

Brushing debris off his Polarfleece jacket and checking himself for cuts and scrapes, Karnazes set off again along the dark road. Only 39 miles to go, then there would be plenty of time for rest.

Karnazes is an ultrarunner. He belongs to a niche of long-distance runners who consider 26.2 miles — the length of a marathon — a mere warm-up. Their races, called ultramarathons, are generally between 30 and 150 miles long, often on steep hiking trails, lasting into the night, with no breaks for sleep. Just to complete them requires almost superhuman endurance. And even among ultrarunners, Karnazes is considered something of a machine.

Some schmuck with a syndicated column writes :

I really want to like Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean. She’s the anti-political wife.

This is no cookie-baking, tea-pouring, stay-at-home helpmate, looking nice for the cameras and always going along. No Bess Truman or Mamie Eisenhower or Laura Bush, reflexively burying her own ambitions so her husband could devote himself to his.

She’s a modern American woman, a busy physician, a mother of two, navigating the rush of competing demands - her patients’ emergencies, her son’s ice-hockey games, the twice-a-month meetings of her mystery-book club.

She says, “My career is just as important as my husband’s career” - and really seems to mean it. Far be it from me to begrudge her passions or her privacy or her dreams. […]

And yet … And yet …

And, surprise, surprise, he proceeds to bedgrude her all those things he said far be it from him to do. ‘Cause, clearly, the world would be a better place with one fewer physician and one more spokesmodel.

I mean if a candidate’s spouse had extreme values that were at odds with the candidate’s stated values, or were, say, a member of a terrorist or hate group, or had advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, those things would be news. But, otherwise, good grief. Why are we supposed to care?

The local free weekly comments on an Oakland alternative high school .

The School of Social Justice and Community Development in East Oakland is a different kind of public high school. The campus opened a couple of years ago after the Oakland school board gave it the go-ahead to become one of the district’s experimental, small alternative schools. On its Web site, the school lists its “general operating norms” for those on campus, one of which is to “Challenge racist, sexist, homophobic … and imperialist statements.” Wilson Riles Jr., known best for challenging the imperialist statements of Jerry Brown, briefly served as its principal.

When it comes to challenging racist statements, though, administrators might want to start at home. Consider the “criteria for collective work,” which the school has posted online. This appears to be a set of principles meant to weed out volunteers, tutors, educators, and visitors who don’t like the school’s radical philosophy. Under the “What We Are Looking For” heading, for example, it includes entries such as “Conscious advocates of the struggle against class exploitation and oppression.”

But among the entries in the “What We Are Not Looking For” section is this: “Culture Vultures, white and privileged people seeking cultural or spiritual affirmation through the appropriation of the cultures and identities of oppressed peoples.”

As a card-carrying Caucasian, Bottom Feeder was a little offended, even saddened that he couldn’t visit the school and have a student threaten to pop a cap in his white ass (more on that in a minute). What if the above criterion were turned on its head to read, “What We Are Not Looking For: Sanctimonious minorities who want to use taxpayer dollars to run a Maoist re-education camp disguised as a high school”? Then what? Yeah, that’s right. People of color might be offended.

=v= In Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty we learn from Paul O'Neill that, in stark contrast to his public persona, George W. Bush routinely bends his will to match those of certain of his advisors. Well, that selfsame quality would seem to extend to his flight-suited action figure, which can even be used to teach yoga! But can one really achieve serenity and wholeness through gritted teeth?

(Via West North)

=v= Apparently the "72 doe-eyed virgins" that supposedly motivated al-Qaeda terrorists is a mistranslation. According to an article in the Guardian (U.K.), the paradisial afterlife of sensual pleasures features not dark-eyed virgins, but white raisins.

One it tempted to make a horribly contrived joke about "Extra Virgin" olive oils in paradise and Popeye converting to Islam, but one will instead be the very model of restraint.

P.S.: The Guardian article is uncredited, so for all I know, they heard it through the grapevine.

From the New York Times .

The United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled against four gay men who were challenging the only blanket state law banning gays from adopting children. Gov. Jeb Bush said the ruling validated Florida’s contention that it was in the best interest of adoptive children, many of whom had troubled backgrounds, “to be placed in a home anchored both by a father and a mother.”

How do the Log Cabin Republicans do it? I really don’t get it.

Syrian cartoonist takes a principled stand.

A Syrian cartoonist rejected a United Nations Correspondents Association award yesterday because it is named for an Israeli, Reuters reported. “As a matter of principle, I refuse to accept an award linked to a Zionist Israeli no matter under whose patronage it was,” the Syrian cartoonist, Raed Khalil, said. “There is no honor in it for me. Most of my cartoons are against Israel and Israeli policies.” The award is named for Ranan Lurie, a much-honored cartoonist who served as a combat major in Israel’s armed forces before immigrating to the United States in 1968 and becoming a citizen. Mr. Khalil said his prize was for a cartoon about “peace and love in the world.” The cartoon showed two men on either bank of a river, watering a plant that linked the two sides. “It is not about peace between Syria and Israel,” he said.

(Via Journalista )

The inventor of the ctrl-alt-del sequence gives props to Bill Gates:

At a 20-year celebration for the IBM PC, Mr. Bradley was on a panel with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other tech icons. The discussion turned to the keys.

“I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous,” Mr. Bradley said.

Mr. Gates didn’t laugh.

(Via The Critical Eye )

=v= Yesterday's New York Times had a story about a geekish quasi-flash mob subway party on a BART train:

When asked, the man hanging from the ceiling volunteered a few thoughts about acts of "urban reclamation" and "space hijacking."

"People need to find more interesting ways to have fun," he said.

The man with the mustaches, who identified himself as a graduate student in computer science, seemed irritated when questioned. But his idea: The point of the party was that there was no point.

"There doesn't have to be a reason," he said. "We're reclaiming public space and showing people that they can make things happen. It is not evolved from corporations."

The Times doesn't seem to know about San Francisco Cacophony Society events along the same lines, but it mentions similar happenings here in New York City. My friends here tell me about an early Critical Mass ride that turned into a subway party. The best ones I've ever heard of, though, were staged by Improv Everywhere.

(Via me, my life + infrastructure)