Month: January 2004

….I just don’t see the Patriots losing today. I’ve seen a number of folks predicting a Colts victory, based probably on the fact that Peyton Manning has been incredibly hot and that you’d think the Law of Averages would work around to handing the Patriots a loss eventually, but I just don’t think that will be today. Maybe in the Super Bowl — both coaches in today’s NFC title game can probably beat Belichick, despite the guy’s apparent status as “George Halas and Vince Lombardi rolled into one scowling body” — but not today.

I, of course, will be rooting strongly for the Colts, but I’ve seen enough great offenses shut down by great defenses to know that this is the likely result today. So, I’ll have to stomach another Patriots appearance in the Super Bowl.

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Over on Collaboratory, John Hardy is collecting expletives designed to get around the Second Commandment (the one about taking the Lord’s name in vain).

(Side observation: I couldn’t remember which of the Commandments this was, so I did a quick Google search since actually walking the twelve feet to the book shelf where I keep my trusty copy of the King James just wasn’t an option, you know? Anyway, when I Google’d “Ten Commandments”, the first two hits had nothing to do with the Bible, but rather centered on computing (Ten Commandments of HTML and C programming, respectively). Hmmmmmm.)

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….just noting that I’ve moved the “Marketplace” section of the sidebar up, for greater visibility. All auction links have been updated (something I tend to be lax about doing here), and new items are listed. Help support my continued online presence and the livibility of my domicile by taking books off my hands! (Yeah, like I’m not gonna go right out and buy new books to replace the old ones. Eeeek. And there’s always the tip-jar.)

See you tomorrow!

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(This one’s slightly morbid, folks.)

I’d always heard the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off” as a kid (mainly used in reference to something I was doing at the time, but we’ll leave that unexplored for now). I never really understood this until I learned from a girlfriend who grew up on a farm (who was actually my future wife, but we’ll leave that unexplored for now) that when you “process” a chicken — i.e., send it on its journey from pecking at seeds to the KFC bucket — you first behead the bird, at which point it flops around wildly until expiring.

On some level, I guess I always wondered why the body should behave in such a way, and it turns out that many of a chicken’s activities are actually controlled not by the poultry’s brain but by its brainstem, so the bird is actually still “alive” in its headless state until it bleeds out. Fair enough — but this raises the possibility that if the beheading isn’t executed quite correctly, the headless chicken can survive for quite some time. Months, even. It will continue to “peck” at the ground and stamp its feet and, generally, act “chicken-like”.

But hey, don’t take my word for it.

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“Any suffiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy.”

BTW, Paul Riddell wants more traffic, so if you like pithy, scientific-minded commentary, go read him. He’s often hilarious.

(Also BTW, I didn’t know that I could use links in Blogger’s titles. Cool!)

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On the off chance that any of my readers watch ER: Are you, like me, watching every moment of the new-and-improved, moderately happy, “putting her life together and seeking new challenges” version of Abby (Maura Tierney) and waiting for Sally Field to walk in and ruin everything?

And in today’s embarrassing admission….I watched an entire episode of that Donald Trump show, The Apprentice or The Accomplice or Survivor: Manhattan or whatever they’re calling it. It was a mildly-interesting reminder of just why people under 30 who have achieved some business success tend to be the most obnoxious and/or downright contemptible people on the planet. And I just loved that one guy, the team-leader dude, who, having been assigned to supervise the creation of an ad campaign, decided not to meet with the client. Oy!

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“Mr. Mayor? This is the Mayor of Minot, North Dakota. We want our weather back.”

[rimshot]

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A mummified lion, found in an Egyptian tomb.

This mummified lion was found in the tomb of King Tut’s wetnurse. Apparently the lion was a sacred animal in ancient Egypt.

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I’m wondering….

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Atrios points out that Dennis Miller is something of a hypocrite in calling for the Left to stop comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Personally, I can’t stand the evocation of Hitler, both because it’s almost always unfair and because on the rare occasion that an analogy to the rise of Naziism might not be totally out-of-line, the mere mention of such seems to be taken as permission to ignore it completely (or mock it derisively).

But I do have to note that the “How dare you call Bush a Nazi!” meme is a lot more hypocritical than just coming from the lips of Dennis Miller. As Atrios points out, it’s not the Left that has used “Hitlery” as a pseudonym for Mrs. Clinton. It’s also not the Left that injected the word “feminazi” into the American discourse. This rhetoric takes place on the far reaches of both sides of the aisle, but somehow you only ever hear about the far-Left calling Bush “Hitler” but never the same rhetoric from the Right, directed at the Left.

Just to take “Hitlery” for an example, a Google search of the Usenet database turns up over 2000 instances of “Hitlery” just in the last six months. And when you refine the general Google web-search for “Hitlery” to just pages updated in the last three months, over eight thousand hits result.

I would also suggest that, for the Right, the ultimate evil seems to actually not be the Nazis but the Communists or the Marxists or the Socialists, words which seem to be interchangeable in the right-wing lexicon. (After all, Reagan has to be the greatest hero in American history for something, right?) Somehow, I’d lay odds that characterization of prominent Democrats — or Democrats in general — as “Communists” is at least as common from the Right as comparison of Bush to Hitler is on the Left.

It’s very tempting to use extreme rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean that we should. And neither does it mean that we should delude ourselves into believing it only comes from the other side.

(Somewhat related to my point is the “cheapening” of our memory of the Nazis that Guy Gavriel Kay cites as a problem with the film The Patriot in this essay from a few years ago.)

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