I can’t even begin to summarize the ways this news story pissed me off.
There’s got to be a way to signify indignant sputtering on a blog.
Shortest campaign ever?
Let’s hear it for Joe Biden, who declared his candidacy for President and then decided to show the world that he could stick his foot in his mouth even faster than the guy already in that office, which is really saying something. Here’s what Biden said about Barack Obama:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
Obama’s “clean”! Imagine that — African Americans have finally come far enough that they can be trusted to field a Presidential candidate who can take a shower and knot a tie!
Honestly, folks, I can’t think of a Democrat I’d less like to see in the Oval Office than Joe Biden. As Kevin Drum says, “He’s just a gaffe machine waiting for someone to flip the power on.”
Share This Post
A National Treasure
I’m watching House, and I just have to take a moment to note that I never see actor Geoffrey Lewis in anything that he doesn’t make me feel all kinds of joy. He’s just all kinds of terrific — one of the finest character actors ever. I mean that.
Moving on….
Share This Post
Huh-WHUH??!!
THE US wants the world’s scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming.
It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be “important insurance” against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a UN report on climate change, the first part of which is due out on Friday).
…
Scientists have previously estimated that reflecting less than 1 per cent of sunlight back into space could compensate for the warming generated by all greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution. Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulfate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The IPCC draft said such ideas were “speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects”.
I swear that these guys vet their policy proposals by a rigorous process of just sitting around and watching old episodes of The Simpsons.
(via)
Share This Post
Sentential Links #86
Eighty-six of these posts (assuming I’ve numbered them correctly)! How cool is that!
Well, not all that cool, I suppose. But here are some links anyway:
:: Well, you know what they say about the size of a man’s foot, don’t you? (I staunchly refuse to post my shoe size here.)
:: I like Cheetos, dammit! And I am not a right wingnut! (That’s the entirety of his post, but I like his point. When did Cheetos become the default stereotypical snack of lunatics and weirdos?)
:: This show came along at just the right time to give sci-fi a jolt it desperately needed. (Drew is reviewing the entirety of Firefly; this is the first in his series of posts doing so. I haven’t watched the entire series yet myself, so is it true that there is no FTL drive on the ships in that show? If so, I just don’t get how the whole cosmology can work, unless they’re in a single solar system with an oddly large number of planets; but then, how can all the outer worlds still exist under Earthlike conditions? Sure, they say they’re terraforming, but you can’t turn Pluto into an Earthlike world; it’s too far from the Sun. Is there something I’m missing?)
:: After the jump, therefore, I present to you: the many middle names of the Son of Man. (Some material here may offend.)
:: I haven’t found much time to write here in recent months, but I’d like to start a new recurring feature: The Scary Fundie Series. (Hoo-boy, this looks like a fun series in the making.)
:: That’s the big debate, isn’t it: whether or not we are in control of our own actions. Predestination…free will…biological machines…these are the terms which have shaped this debate. (Wow, am I ever out of practice when it comes to thinking about such things!)
All for this week. Tune in again….
Share This Post
Too bad they suck….
One of the towns adjacent to the one in which I live is called Hamburg, NY. A bit of the local lore of that particular burg is a claim that their town is the site where the quintessential American sandwich, the hamburger, was invented.
This guy says this is false, and that the hamburger as we know it today was invented by the guy who started the White Castle chain.
While I don’t have much emotional investment in our local claim to have invented burgers, it does disappoint me that the thing was birthed by White Castle. That would be like learning that pizza was invented by Little Caesar’s.
(If you can’t tell from my tone, the mythic appeal of White Castle has always escaped me. Those little burgers of theirs are nasty.)
Share This Post
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
It’s been a good week for weirdness out there!
:: Not actually weird, but really pretty cool: Lynn linked a post on another blog about a minimalist composer named Rhys Chatham who recently contrived a work that is scored for electric guitars. Plural. And not just two or three, but four hundred electric guitars. It’s nothing “heavy metal” like at all; all those guitars combine to form a fascinating soundscape. There’s nothing about unusually-massive musical forces that require a resulting work to be trashy; Hector Berlioz was a master of huge orchestras, and he postulated that the effect should be “powerful” rather than tasteless. I’d like to hear this entire piece. An MP3 download of the first movement (quite a large file) can be found here.
:: As usual, good weirdness at MeFi, in particular this thread devoted to a possibly spoof “dating site” for “beautiful people”. As usual, the key attraction to MeFi threads like this is the snarky commentary:
Fantastic website. All the most nightmarishly shallow, ignorant, irrelevant people you truly need to avoid, in one convenient location…with pictures, so that you know who they are without a doubt.
Mmmmm.. I’m feelin kinda Ayn Randy I am.
it’s survival of the fittest … if it was survival of the cutest, kittens would have ruled the earth long ago
The majority of the most thoroughly screwed-up, personally repugnant (aka batshitinsane) people I’ve ever met have been very visually attractive.
You know what makes me laugh? When two really pretty and vain people get together and create really goofy looking kids. That makes me laugh. And only a little bit because I have beautiful kids. Mostly because I like it when vain people get a little reality smackdown.
My parents are both more beautiful than me. Can I sue Darwin?
But then the thread gets all serious and stuff. Do we have to always derail good snark with serious discussions of sociology?
:: CNN ran this article the other day about the season debut of the long-running (second only to The Simpsons) FOX animated show King of the Hill. It’s a pretty good article, actually; what’s weird about it is the goofy list of “bullet points” at the top of the article, in a box labeled “Story Highlights”. Have we become so poor readers that we need a helpful list of bullet-points, summarizing an article before we even read it???
:: And this week’s winner, via Shamus. The brain nearly shuts down, trying to list all the ways that this is just plain wrong.
I await the fuzzy-kitten version of King Lear….
Share This Post
Do-gooders
Jeff of Psychosomatic Wit reproduces this column by Reg Henry, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. I’ve never heard of Henry before, but on the basis of this column, I may be keeping tabs on him in the future. Here’s a sample:
To my mind, one of the oddest slurs hurled against anyone is that he or she is a “do-gooder.” Apparently our society has decided that it is a terrible thing to do good, although this is not what we tell our children.
Public prejudice against the “do-gooder” is enshrined in an unflattering dictionary definition –“A person who seeks to correct social ills in an idealistic, but usually impractical or superficial, way.” This meaning reflects the understanding of an old proverb: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
That may be so. I have never actually been in hell — I just remember high school algebra class.
But it occurs to me that the road to hell is more often paved with bad intentions or their close relations, which are indifference and/or arrogance. (If it’s a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation project, potholes may also be built into the paving.)
I reckon “do-bad-ers” with their hard hearts also help pave the road to hell, but it is only “bleeding hearts” that are seen as the problem. “Bleeding heart” is a popular alternative epithet to “do-gooder.”
Yes, bleeding hearts and do-gooders are a risible lot, annoying interferers in the tough, no-nonsense, practical-minded business of life. But I have to think that good intentions and pulsing hearts have also paved the road to heaven.
Share This Post
Nothing like it!
I really love it when I cook steak for lunch or dinner, and then get the whole place smelling of wonderful seared red meat, and then later on leaving the apartment for a while after having grown accustomed to the scent, and finally coming back home to get freshly hit in the face with the fine, fine aroma of steak.
Heck, I just plain like steak.
Moving on….
Share This Post
Oooooh! Pretty! (Take Two)
I continue to discover stuff about New Blogger. First of all, if you view any single post on this blog by itself (click the permalink to do this), there’s a sidebar item called “Previously on Byzantium’s Shores“. This used to consist of a list of the eight or nine posts immediately preceding whatever particular post you’d be reading, but now it seems that this always lists the most recent eight or nine posts published. In other words, if you go to some post from two years ago in my archives, the “Previously on…” list would be the eight or nine posts prior to that one. Now, the post from two years ago will list the posts that have appeared today. This makes that feature a lot more useful, I think — the idea is to encourage people arriving at the blog via very old posts to check out what’s new.
I also like the way that when you make a single change to your template, BAM! It is applied automatically to every post, and you don’t have to republish the entire blog. (Republishing the entire blog was always a big pain in the ass.) I suspect this works by having Google/Blogger generate each individual post-page on the fly, rather than actually creating separate pages for each post, storing them on some server somewhere, and then loading them appropriately. (I wonder what effect this has on search engine spidering of the archives, though.)
The idea of labels needs a bit of work still, it seems. Currently there’s no automated way for me to stick a list of my labels in the sidebar somewhere, so you can load every single post labeled a certain way. This is possible for bloggers using one of the free templates Blogger provides, which already contains the necessary code, but they haven’t got round yet to making this possible for dinosaurs like myself on older templates. (I can probably hand-code this utility into my template, and I probably will, but it’s not going to be a huge priority.)
Also, if you do click on one of my Label tags to get every post in that series, currently with my template you only get the most recent 20 or so posts with that label, and none of the ones farther back than that. This makes labels less useful to me at this point, although I will still be using them in anticipation of the time when these issues are resolved.
I have not yet attempted to post directly to the blog via Google Documents.
And there’s my progress report for New Blogger. So far I’m impressed. Looks like I’m staying on Blogger for the foreseeable future!