Shouldn't that be our principle?

"If an adult in this country, with his or her own money, wants to engage in an activity that harms no one, how dare we prohibit it because it doesn't add to the GDP or it has no macroeconomic benefit. Are we all to take home calculators and, until we have satisfied the gentleman from Iowa that we are being socially useful, we abstain from recreational activities that we choose?... People have said, What is the value of gambling ? Here is the value. Some human beings enjoy doing it. Shouldn't that be our principle? If individuals like doing something and they harm no one, we will allow them to do it, even if other people disapprove of what they do."

 

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) talking back to Rep. Jim Leach, one of the main forces behind the prohibtionist anti-gambling legislation that passed last week.

[Thx: Hit and Run]

Creature from the Miso Lagoon

Sarah found a creature in her soup:

The miso soup, on the other hand, started off very promisingly. The flavor was hearty and they didn't stint on the seaweed. And I loved the tofu chunks--they had been deep-fried and thus had a little bite to them instead of being tasteless and crumbling. But then I encountered a little creature with big round black eyes on the side of his head.

My first thought was that she was taking this way too calmly. I never, ever want to be eating a dish and find that SOMETHING WITH A FACE has bobbed to the surface. Unless I ordered something with a face, then I'll be disappointed if it's eyes aren't dewey and plaintive.

Then I read Judy's comment, and was somewhat mollified. I guess it was supposed to be there. Although, Sarah's description of this little creature sounds alarmingly like some sort of parasitic worm that would try to burrow into my ear and make me want to climb ladders all the time.

Here is what would have happened had this been my miso:
creature: [blurb]
ringloss: Gah!
creature: [stares]
ringloss: (to proprietor) Excuse me sir, why does my miso HAVE A FACE!?!?!?!?!?!
proprietor: Sir, that is a _____ [translates as "tasty squid creature"]. It is very good for you, lots of vitamin A.
ringloss: [bashful silence] [contemplates saying "Vitamin A? More like Vitamin I!", but is too cowed by smothering sense of own cross-cultural ignorance] [stares blankly thinking about that one X-Files episode with the giant flukeworm/human hybrid] [hides creature in wadded napkin]

True.

Roast Beef says:

I ain't sayin' we ain't got to clean up greenhouse damage and all that, but please can we do it with some cars that do not look like a Reebok. I mean a man cannot drive a Prius, it is like exactly the shape of the mouse that is under your hand, and has about the same horsepower.

[Thx: Achewood]

Tagged! Things To Eat Before You Die

Picking up the gauntlet thrown by Tart Sarah (one of three), I give you  Things To Eat Before You Die

 

1- Kalua pig, plate lunch style with two scoops of rice and a scoop of macaroni salad, from a roadside stand in Hawaii.  One day I hope to install one of those bovine research portals, so that I can, er,  manually increase my throughput and be able to eat this all day.  No really, all day.  (I'll skip the macaroni salad, because I am strange and picky.)

2- Cheeseburger, with a fried egg on top, with french fries and a milkshake.  I mean, a cheeseburger is great right?  But then they put an egg on it.  A freakin' fried egg.  So wrong.  So right.  Enjoy responsibly.  You can get this at Red Robin; yeah, it's a chain.  I think there might be something about this meal that requires a certain economy of scale to achieve.  (Honestly, in this case the fries are just there to cleanse the palate between waves of juicy burger and milkshake.)

3- Hudson Bay bread and peanut butter, washed down with kool-aid.  This is one of those situational entries that wouldn't taste nearly as good if you hadn't just spent the morning paddling across bright clean lakes and carrying a canoe on your shoulders through knee-deep mud.  (Also, after lunch it's your turn to ride in the middle of the canoe, where your only responsibilities are to contemplate the dragonflies and not get your fingertips bitten off by pike.)

4- Steak and hashbrowns.  Set out on the counter to come up to room temperature an hour before grilling, liberally coated with freshly ground pepper and kosher salt.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of medium, on the rare side of the street -- it shouldn't need a tourniquet, but will require first aid.  Only a couplefew minutes each side on the hottest grill you can light.  I'm too lazy to grate my own potatoes, so I use the dried kind that you reconstitute with hot water in the little milk carton.  Cooked slow; browned of course, but not super-crispy.  Salt only.  This is the Food of Men.  Served with a tall Velvet Crush (that's kool-aid and gin).  (You may think that the drink detracts from the manitude of the meal.  You would be wrong.  It is the presence of that incongruity, that paradoxical imperfection, that allows this meal to ascend to Capital Letters of masculinity.  That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

5- Homemade ice cream, fresh out of the maker.  It's never quite as awesome the second day -- presuming it lasts.  If I was Stan Lee, I would say "'Nuff Said" here; but I'm not.  Inter the extra ingredients of your choice to the churning, icy tomb and prepare your mouth for a dollop of heaven.  (Or something like that.)

I guess I kinda fudged* with my five choices, in that they are closer to examples of things that I love than things I expect other people will love.  Even then, I had some trouble coming up with five items for the list.  The topology of the Foods I Love graph is flatter than I expected.  It's like a broad expanse of rolling hills (with a few chasms around places like "beets" and "condiments") that doesn't have many isolated peaks that rise high enough to be all that distinctive from a few counties away.  Rather, they don't rise high enough on their intrinsic culinary qualities alone.  Mostly they are elevated by fond memories of family and friends, which doesn't translate so well into Eat Before You Die prescriptions intended for the general audience.

Well, that and I won't cop to loving aerosol cheese on corn chips.

 

 

Anyhoo, there it is.  Now:  I choose you Clarkachu.

 

*OMG I forgot fudge!

Q: Who has saved perhaps more lives than anyone else in history?

A: Norman Borlaug

 

In the late 1960s, lest we forget, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions of people would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in "The Population Bomb," his 1968 best seller. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

As Mr. Ehrlich was making his dark predictions, Mr. Borlaug was embarking on just such a crash program. Working with scientists and administrators in India and Pakistan, he succeeded in getting his highly productive dwarf wheat varieties to hundreds of thousands of South Asian peasant farmers. These varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than traditional varieties.

And I like this last bit too:

[Borlaug] also laments the unnecessary suspicion with which biotech is treated these days. "Activists have resisted research," he notes, "and governments have overregulated it." They both miss the point. "Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy: starvation is."

 
[Thx: Hit and Run]

fops. lol

From the Slate review of the MTV Video Music Awards, my new favorite line describing Emo fashion:

 

The emo band Panic! At the Disco, its members attired with all the ridiculousness of fops but none of the panache...

Hudson Bay Bread

I remember eating this stuff every day for lunch with a thick spackling of military-grade peanut butter at Sommers Canoe Base when I was a Scout.   After paddling and portaging all morning through the Boundary Waters in Minnesota/Canada, it was the Best. Lunch. Evar.

 

I didn't even know it had a name.  I kinda figured that it was some Army surplus thing.  Mostly because it was served with acronym-laden green plastic pouches of peanut butter.

 

I forget why I originally entered it, but I found a note to myself in my PDA to check out recipes for Hudson Bay Bread.  The serendipitous first link from the Google search referenced not just what I was looking for, but was from the place where I ate it.

 

Other takeaways from that trip:

1) Having to carry everything in our canoes (or on our backs when portaging) resulted in lots of one-pot meals for dinners.  This was not an attractive prospect for a picky eater.  With the wonderful incentive of "eat or go hungry" I learned that I can choke down most anything that I don't like -- as long as I can douse it with salt.

 

2) My Army surplus wide-brimmed hat.  Such a great hat.  So many ugly, wife-consternating sweat stains.

 

 

Gloomy damn lies

Whenever I hear someone making suspicious claims, it's easy to ask for the numbers that back those claims.  But even when numbers are produced, it's still worth asking after the hidden assumptions beneath the statistics.

As an example, this nice article by Virginia Postrel* about gloomy claims that our standard of living is stagnant:

Nowadays, candid and intelligent people--not to mention partisans--tell us that the average American's standard of living has barely budged in decades. Supposedly only the rich are living better, while everyone else stagnates or falls behind.

And today's gloom peddlers can claim to have scientific data on their side. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median real income of a full-time working male rose only 4% between 1981 and 2001, from $44,000 to $45,900 in today's dollars.
[...]
Do we want to know how much money it would take the typical American to buy today what the typical American bought 20 years ago? If so, what about all those things that didn't exist back then--not just iPods and mobile phones but everyday items like wrinkle-free pants, effective sunscreens, prewashed salads-in-a-bag or comfy hotel beds?

*You may need to use BugMeNot to get to the full article.

Hail Satan!

This is so out of date, but...

On 6/6/06 my blog received its 666th visit.

I shit you not.

Boldly going.

This optimism, more than any correct guesses about wireless telephony, police use of Tasers, or the shape of 21st-century neoconservatism, was the dangerous message of Star Trek. The dystopian science fiction of the late '60s and early '70s (to which Star Trek was a rare exception) shares something with contemporary hysteria over stem cell research. Both claim to fear that the advance of science will hurt us, but their real fear is that it won't hurt us. Because if human life really is getting better, then maybe you've wasted your life fearing the unknown, clinging to useless traditions, missing out on better things ahead.

 

From "Happy 40th Birthday, Star Trek - Why Captain Kirk's story is the story of America" in Reason.

Stupid TV. Be more funny!

There's an "A Prairie Home Companion" movie!?!?!?

 

[shudder]

 

"In the opening scene, we learn that the family-owned radio station that broadcasts A Prairie Home has been bought by a Texas Christian conglomerate, and we witness the behind-the-scenes mischief of the show's last performance."

 

Must.... prevent.... eyes... from..... rolling.... GAH, couldn't do it.

 

What do you call a woman who uses the rhythm method?

Here's a thing:  "Some 40 percent of embryos produced naturally do not implant and so never develop into babies."(ref)

 

Thus:

"...the rhythm method may well be responsible for massive embryonic death, and the same logic that turned pro-lifers away from morning after pills, IUDs, and pill usage, should also make them nervous about the rhythm method "

From an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, via Hit and Run

 

Maybe their math and/or logic is goofy, but its an interesting conclusion to make when you consider the significant number of fertilized eggs that are naturally discarded on a daily basis.

 

Bonus item:

"John Rock was christened in 1890 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and married by Cardinal William O'Connell, of Boston. He had five children and nineteen grandchildren. A crucifix hung above his desk, and nearly every day of his adult life he attended the 7 a.m. Mass at St. Mary's in Brookline. Rock, his friends would say, was in love with his church. He was also one of the inventors of the birth-control pill, and it was his conviction that his faith and his vocation were perfectly compatible."
 

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about him in the New Yorker.

 

 

fungeye

The Consumerist has some nice squicky pics of the ReNu-associated eye fungus.

 

This is what the last segment of 2001: A Space Odyssey would look like if the monolith was all about squishily bioengineering Dave Bowman instead of transporting him through a wormhole.*

 

 

*Did that make any sense to anyone but me?

Strange blog coincidences...

... that surely only interest me.

Last week:
- A work conversation revealed that Imitation of Life is a coworker's favorite movie.
- I watched Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control
- Then I saw this Hit and Run post about Errol Morris writing about a strange connection between Imitation of Life and This Island Earth (a goofy SF movie that was mocked in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie).

Also last week:
- My Mom mentioned that her office had a visitor from their parent company in Australia.  The visitor said that the Australian government is paying women $4000 to have babies.
- Then I saw this Hit and Run post about some Fox News commentator encouraging Americans to breed for the good of the race.

Free Comic Book Day!

Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day, so, go and get your free comics.

I AM BORED, TELL ME SOMETHING MORE EXCITING

Honestly, I remember laughing about Dr. Sbaitso in a dorm room with Ratcrow more than I remember actually talking to him, but this article is still amusing.

[Thx: Gizmodo]

Where would I be without my PC?

There's a possibility of new material from Information Society.  It's without Kurt, but it's still totally cool.

Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat

The Pet Shop Boys are touring a new album and new single, "I'm With Stupid," which, depending on how you hear it, is either about a disintegrating gay relationship or ire at George Bush and Tony Blair.

 

Here is a post about problems they had with the BBC toning down the costumes during a performance of the song.  With YouTube video.

 

[Thx: Hit and Run]

May Day

It's International Workers' Day.  Instead of singing The Internationale, let's read this:

 

Welcome to Catallarchy's annual Day of Remembrance.  Contrary to the promises of ideology, nations whose governments pledged to create a workers' paradise usually became places of rampant slave labor.  The plight of the less fortunate became even less fortunate.  Today, we chronicle a small part of their lives.

 

 

 

 

Jack Chick + anything = comedy gold

"Bruce Vilanch"

 

LOL

 

(scroll to "2006-04-13 01:25:33 PM")

 

You leave your car, I'll leave my heart, To strive with techno culture

This traffic simulation is pretty neat, but I couldn't find the buttons for "stained mattress in the left lane", "stripped Civic on the shoulder", or "zombie crossing".

 

[Thx: GeekPress]

Google Calendar

It's everything I hoped for.

 

(except PDA syncing...)

 

[Thx: Ars Technica]

Google search term referrals

"donkey humping a guy"*

"elephant humping"

"elephant humping donkey"

"illegal pete's calorie"

"donkey humping"

"same f*cking difference"

"bizarre love triangle up person" (from Japan)

"donkey humping photo"

"cyst on the brain" (from Australia)

"VW electricals" (from Hungary)

"dremel stopped working"

"battery recalibration"

"vw golf remove fan controls"

 

*Internets, I love you.

Le Voyage Dans La Lune

We are totally going to break the moon.

 

"As part of the plan to put robot explorers -- and, later, people -- on the moon, NASA will crash a spacecraft into the lunar surface in 2008. The explosion should be visible from Earth. "

 

This is going to freak out some dude who didn't hear about it*.

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Yes, I know you will probably need a telescope to see the plume.

Yo ho ho

The Oak Island Money Pit was on "Bones" the other week (maybe last week, the DVR has stolen my ability to know when shows are on).

Waitaminute, why is he nailed to a nopal cactus?

"Archeologists have discovered a huge 1,500-year-old pre-Hispanic pyramid in a working class district of Mexico City after digging into a hill used every year to depict the crucifixion of Christ. "

 

They should have been suspicious when the annual Passion Play included a Last Supper of corn beer and human heart.

 

[Thx: Digg]

Worthwhile baby gear.

"Which baby gear items did you find crucial?  Which baby gear items are you sure you could do without?  Which ones did you wish you have?"
 

The list.

 

[Thx: Parenthacks]
 

goo goo

How Babies Learn Their First Words

"Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study finds."

[Thx: GeekPress]

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060308-6341.html

me = dork

IM Conversation

lazyj: i need a tat2 as well

ringloss: you need one on your lower belly, so it looks like Silver
Surfer is riding your junk.

lazyj: f'n sweet

Dispatch from the dairy underground.

"The [bathtub] cheese was seized last Saturday by a multiagency task force that included CDFA officers, Ontario police and Riverside and San Bernardino County sheriff's deputies. Also seized were wooden cheese presses, molds and other items used in production. Two men at the ranch were cited for illegal cheese production."

[Thx: The Agitator]

Right now there is cyst in your brain, making you think things.

Bad things.

About cat pee.

The Loom:
"It's estimated that about half of all people on Earth are infected with Toxoplasma."

Parasites bother me deeply. Just the non-brain-controlling kind are enough to make me squirm. Now I start to wonder if my aversion to parasites is actually caused by other parasites humping my spinal column to make me fear/avoid their competitors as an evolutionary advantage.

Excuse me while I go lurch towards the neighbor's pets on the mindless imperative of my catshit masters.

That was a brilliant idea, stuffing the muffler full of thousands and thousands of match heads...

...and igniting them thereupon providing adequate thrust to break free of the earth's pull.
[From "Bad Day on the Moon"]
SAM: So let me get this straight. We can breathe here then?
MAX: I guess those candy-butt astronauts didn't have the stones to try it.
SAM: I could never say that about an astronaut.

Sam & Max are back! As a slick webcomic (mouse over the images).

[Thx: Screenhead]

Cages, poop; the internet comes through for us again.

A couple of sweet links from TheCyanide:

Babies in cages, just as our Founding Fathers intended*.

The Best Poop Report of 2005: The Day I Ruined Thanksgiving

If you pucker up your ass just right, and lean forward just a little bit, you can make any gas you may have inside you leak out quietly, like a ninja. It wouldn't go over well to have forty friends and family members hear a huge ass explosion from the mayor not five feet away.

* Little known fact from the History of our Great Country:
Had the Founding Fathers original intentions prevailed, housing infants in cages would have been Constitutionally mandated. Unfortunately, due to the Rules of Order in place at the time, that clause required unanimous approval. Thanks, Franklin.

Blog worth reading.

Asymmetrical Information

Jane Galt is always posting things that are well written and well reasoned. Her posts are always worth my time to read. So, I am adding Asymmetrical Information to my Links over on the right.

Latest example:

...As bad as terrorism is, there are worse things in the world, and governments that spy on their citizens, and torture them, and imprison them without trial, are among those things. Undoubtedly, if I ended up dying in a terrorist attack, I would wish we had done more. But hey, if I was killed in a car accident, I'd undoubtedly wish that the guy who hit me had had his license pulled. This would not be an argument for shuttering the interstates and making everyone get around on Shank's ponies.

And from the comments on that post:

...It is in the nature of government officials to see all the worthy (at least in their minds) goals they could achieve with a touch more power, and seek to expand their power accordingly. I do not blame them for this, nor am I under the absurd illusion that this is some sort of uniquely Republican vice, as even a brief acquaintance with Janet Reno's tenure certainly proves otherwise. But I do think we've got to watch them closely, all the time, to make sure that they don't expand their power unreasonably--and when they do, to take that power back as quick as we can.

Of course, you should read the whole thing. It's worth it.

[proper name from your favorite party]

From Reason Express, Vol. 9, No. 3, January 18, 2006:

2. Bush Defense: Clinton Did It
[...]
It is the extent of the Bush push that is breathtaking. When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argues that it is sufficient that the president's Justice Department's has vetted the necessity and propriety of the wiretapping, he is effectively claiming that judicial input is simply not relevant to any matter the president ropes off as involving "national security."

The potential for serious abuse of this standard should be obvious. If not, maybe Bush partisans should imagine Hillary Clinton wielding that power.

You can pretty much replace those proper names with madlib blanks and put in whoever you want. I won't presume to add any more than that. It's just a good thing to keep in mind when thinking about political power.

Hey ladies, how much do you love football. No, really. How much?

Playoff tickets available.

More like:
"Our 850-square-foot hospitality parlors, located on the top three floors of our Denver, Colorado hotel, offer complimentary car service to a variety of discrete vacant lots (includes tools to dig shallow grave)."

[Thx: JaXed]

Fun with data mining.

A while back, I purchased a Haynes auto repair manual for our '93 Geo Storm from one of the used book vendors on Amazon. It has paid for itself many times over. Most recently for the torque specifications for the spark plugs that seem to enjoy wriggling out of their sockets like parasites exiting the corpse of their used-up host.

So, I just got this email from Amazon:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

As someone who has purchased books by Robert Maddox, you might like to know that Honda Accord 1998 Thru 2002: All Models (Hayne's Automotive Repair Manual) will be released in paperback soon. You can pre-order your copy at a savings of 32% by following the link below.

This can only be explained by magic! I know they know I bought it and all, but how did they know how much I loved it? How did they know that I have become a Maddox completist? How did they know about the Robert Maddox fan-fiction that I put up on my MySpace page? (I'm particularly proud of my epic ten-parter Corvair Monza 1970 Thru 1972: The Manual That Never Was)

Internets, I love you.

Noble Hardware

Anyone need any premium rowing gear?

You need to go to Noble Hardware.

Not only is he rocking some seriously clever products:

Noble Hardware has in-house capabilities for:

• Complete computer aided design, 3D modeling, and computer aided engineering.


• Full 2D and 3D CNC machining of woods, plastics, and metals.


• Welding of steel, stainless steel and aluminum with TIG and MIG processes.
  

  Rowing-related or not, we can help you with your design concepts.

How cool is that?



(Hint: very.)

Unsafe at any speed.

Ralph Nader's Public Citizen:
"On March 28th of this year, we petitioned the FDA to immediately ban the attention deficit drug Cylert (pemoline--Abbott) and all generic versions of pemoline because of clear evidence that the drug causes liver failure and that it has no unique advantage over other drugs used to treat this condition."

Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden:
"Cylert (generic name "pemoline") has been the most effective treatment for Teresa's narcolepsy in 24 years since she was first diagnosed. She's been taking it for most of that time. Now it's gone.
[...]
Cylert has been implicated in some people's liver problems. Teresa is regularly tested and her liver is fine. Evidently Abbott, makers of brand-name Cylert, discontinued it in March—but Sandoz intended to keep making the generic version, until the FDA, pressured by Nader's group, weighed in to discontinue it entirely—despite a last-minute appeal from the Narcolepsy Network. Thank you, Public Citizen, for completely shafting my wife."
[... ...]
"Cylert and liver failure: After twenty-plus years on Cylert, my liver is just fine. I don't see why I shouldn't have the option of self-monitoring for symptoms of liver failure plus regular tests."

It's certainly easy (and right!) to blame busybody Nader* and his Public Citizen minions for this, but these nannies would not have the ability to force their values and desires onto the rest of us if it were not for the FDA.  The FDA that has the power to make it illegal for an adult to make a personal decision to balance risks and benefits of a chemical and put whatever the hell they want to into their own body.

[Thx: Hit and Run]

* Yeah, I voted for him in 2000. And I regret it now. To be more precise: I regret voting for Nader, I do not regret voting against those other two jackrods. At that time, I channeled my festering discontent with the political system into a naive faith in the potential for meaningful reform. I was under no illusion that Nader would win, but it was nice doing something about the problem (okay, feeling like I was doing something about the problem). I went to a couple rallies, volunteered at the local campaign headquarters making signs and get-out-the-vote calls, and even waved a sign at the corner of a busy intersection on election day. Good times.

Later, I learned more details (from various sources both neutral and unsympathetic to him) about the various things that Ralph Nader actually did in the past, how they were accomplished, and his various hypocrisies. I became less impressed with him, but still considered him a well-intentioned guy with the best interests of the public at heart. Later still, as my own ideas about the role of the government, collectivism vs individualism, and personal liberty evolved I came to view Nader as a well-intentioned nannyfascist out to coerce the rest of us to conform his way of thinking, for our own good.

I totally have to give him props for the Freedom of Information Act, though. That's a pretty cool legacy. It could be argued that the good of the FOIA might overshadow his general priggishness and the damage his other projects have caused. Or, maybe not.

P.S. If it bothers you that Nader was a "spoiler" who "sucked votes away from", and prevented "your guy" from "getting elected", grow some gonads and field a candidate worth voting for.

P.P.S. That sounded really defensive, didn't it? I should dig out my t-shirt that shows a donkey humping an elephant and an elephant humping a donkey, and reads "SAME F*CKING DIFFERENCE". I will clutch it to my chest and remember the days when my cynicism was a small burning knot in my stomach, inspiring purposeful action.  The days before that knot metastasized into the spine-crushing, bowel-clogging mass of dashed hopes and resentment that makes me the bitter crank I am today.

Remember: the realtor is not your friend.

"If I were a Realtor, I might feel right about now that the entire free world has turned against me, having decided I'm a sharp-elbowed,
greed-driven hustler trying to preserve an advantage that I don't deserve. And I'd probably be right."

From the blog by the authors of the book Freakonomics,
which is excellent. You will learn many interesting things by reading
it.