❮❮prevnext❯❯

Reading "How to Hide an Empire" about USA's expansionism.

So Republicans have a claim to having had been the abolitionist Party of Lincoln, and modern partisans like to may hay with that- utterly sidestepping the reversal that happened after the Civil Rights Act, the Solid South changing from a Democratic stronghold to the Republican base.

But in this book, before the pivot, it is interesting to see that it's the (at the time, more Northerner) Republicans who tend towards expansionism and imperialism, and the Democrats who fight that, even before the pivot I mention. Now to be fair, that anti-Imperialism might also be tinged with a kind of "America First" isolationism that I might not like either, but it certainly puts the lie to a simplified "North/South swap following the Civil Rights Act" model

---

"Coward" should really mean "to move in the direction of a cow"

"This isn't a painting. It is the most detailed image of a human cell to date, obtained by radiography, nuclear magnetic resonance and cryoelectron microscopy."

---

Perhaps THIS move, watching all these strong movers wrestle SO MUCH STUFF down 3 flights of stairs, along with the general challenges of moving from a compact apartment to a maybe even more compact condo will be the one that gets me to rethink the quantity of my material possessions?

Not banking on it. But trying to snapshot this mood for use later...

But scientifically speaking I think social scientists mean a particular thing when they use the term 'happiness' or 'well-being', and this is the definition I end up using in the course, which is that you can basically say you're happy if you have a lot of well-being in your life, and for your life. And what we mean by that is happiness in your life is the sort of... almost hedonistic kind of positive emotion-type stuff. You're happy in your life if you have lots of positive emotions, and laughter, and so on, and not many negative emotions, like relatively speaking there's not a tremendous amount of sadness, and anger, although we can debate about how much of that you want. But that's kind of being happy *in* your life. But there's another feature that the social scientists really care about, and that's you're happy *with* your life. And so that's basically your answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life right now?

This two sided approach to happiness - happy in your life AND with your life - is a better answer to that issue of, most people would decline a drug that made them happy but dysfunctionally stupid forever... my previous answer was "well it's the 'wrong type' of happiness" but this dichotomy labels it more neatly

---

---

Non-Americans Are Baffled By Some Of The Things Americans Do In Movies (30 Tweets)Most of these were pretty much "yes" tho less so chips ON sandwiches

---

Melissa and I watched "SNL-from-home" last night.

Never anticipated that a side-effect of a major worldwide pandemic would be turning all entertainers who usually work with studio audiences into basically less-polished Youtubers.

It is fascinating to see entertainers homes though. (Especially SNL, where the same room is going to be used for multiple skits.)

---

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.

---

Third in (what is apparently becoming) a series:
Just something about that cat and that chair...

---

I'm grateful we're on the upswing for daylight! Third floor benefit, even on an overcast day on a fifth week of mostly being inside, the amount of natural light is helpful...

---

When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that's the way it's gotta be.

---

The President doesn't have total authority. We have a Constitution. We don't have a king.

Had an intense dream about getting eye-replacement surgery-- was crying with gratitude. In the dream it was practically outpatient surgery. Not sure if I should blame having to wear my backup eyeglasses yesterday or this Zuckerberg-themed tweet that has been making the rounds...

adore my incredible dad who loves his family so much that he got eye enlargement surgery so he can look at us more

---

"What's the best piece of advice someone's ever given you?"

"After you've written something, rewrite it. And then after you've rewritten it, read it again, and then rewrite it again. There isn't anything you've written that's worthwhile and important that can't be improved."

Lovely long read about Bede the Venerable and books in a dark time. What an amazing technology they were, what a boon to humanity's ability to preserve and share information. Parts of the longread go into the technolgoy of it, the scribes having to be chemists as well to make their own colors of inks; reminds me of how lately I've been thinking about the physicality of the making of brass instruments and of sailing ships (thanks to reading "Master + Commander")

---

Our future selves are strangers to us.

This isn't some poetic metaphor; it's a neurological fact. FMRI studies suggest that when you imagine your future self, your brain does something weird: It stops acting as if you're thinking about yourself. Instead, it starts acting as if you're thinking about a *completely different person.*

I wonder how it looks for our past selves?

---

Projects!

Piet was by profession a builder, in love with snug right-angled things

---

Harold believed that beauty was what happened between people, was in a sense the trace of what had happened, so he in truth found her, though minutely creased and puckered and sagging, more beautiful than the unused girl whose ruins she thought of herself as inhabiting.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot; like "Fear of Flying", I think I enjoy reading about sex and relationships in earlier eras. I liked the banter of the couples, the romantic letters a few of the lovers wrote, and was really stirred by this empathy when one of the adulterers accidentally gets his lover pregnant, that nightmarish "Oh, CRAP" kind of feeling of the unexpected expected phone call...

Another nice little passage:

Mouths, it came to Piet, are noble. They move in the brain’s court. We set our genitals mating down below like peasants, but when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry. To eat another is sacred.

---

Wired on Susie Mc­Kinnon, a woman who has no episodic memories. It's astonishes me how normal a life she is able to lead; it really shines a light on how bad my mental model of our way of thinking our way through the universe is, much like I kind of can't get over how kids can have conversations before they are potty trained. Or the way the brain rebuilds itself after stroke-like conditions (I'm tempted to watch that Netflix "My Beautiful Broken Brain" that had this giant billboard over one of the HONK!TX events in Austin.) Rationality and formal thinking are such powerful tools, but they're just not what we DO.

It's also a great philosophical question of who has a "better" life: McKinnon, who remembers nothing, or Jill Price, who remembers everything.

---

http://cheezburger.com/8762580224 Heh. In the same vein of "did Adam have a bellybutton", fun thinking about the implication of Jesus not having a source of a Y chromosome... Dropping off a friend in Montpellier, VT-- by kismet a production of "Our Town", a play I've been meaning to see, is being put on by the local Lost Nation Theater company, so I'll get home a little later but culturally richer.

I remember seeing this video but not paying it nearly enough attention; both the video and the song are terrific. (You can get an MP3 from the video version, which I find a lot more viscerally appealing than the (also good) studio track.)

Its chorus "Needing is one thing, and getting, getting's another" brings up a point that might sound pedantic as hell, but for me is serious, and existential, and came close to disrupting a romance of mine at one point. (And I found out while writing this, might echo for my vision of relationships to this day.)

What does it mean to "need" something?

Some part of me (a well-meaning yet still smart aleck inner child part) wants to say it HAS to be existential; without the needed object, the needing subject would fail to exist. "You can't live without me? Why aren't you dead yet?"

But that seems a little blunt. Some old guy might need his meds, but that doesn't necessarily mean he'd die without him, or right away. As a young man I needed my dad, but I survived his passing. (The romance I mentioned stumbled (but recovered, for a long while) over my reticence of using that kind of "I need you" language; I think I might have used that logic of "I survived my dad's death, so I guess I'd survive you leaving me or something happening to you." For a guy who runs loveblender.com I really have my moments, or lack of them.)

So is it just a form of "extreme want"? Or to avoid the side effects of not-having? That seems to lack a certain rhetorical punch...

OK, I think I figured it out, and actually figured it out for the first time, after pondering it a few days, while writing some disclaimers as a now-deleted second part of that smart aleck paragraph, which I then decided to save for this conclusion: properly used, "need" IS existential, not necessarily in terms of life or death, but a true need is such that lacking the needed object the thing needing would become a whole 'nother thing. I survived my dad's death, but I'm not nearly the same guy I would have been with him, I think. The old guy without his meds just isn't the same person.

(A "needed" but lost romantic interest, then, should leave a husk of a man or woman behind. He or she may grow back into something stronger, but it will be strong but different. Hmmm... This may be why I find "I want you" sexier than "I need you". I worry I had my "need" romances in high school and college and what's left, the me that is... doesn't want to need, or be subject to the responsibility of being needed. I guess I prefer love that springs from a rich luxury of two self-realized and independent people over a "need" that is tough to separate out from codependence, or other types of dependence, like financial.)

Thanks for reading. Writing helped me figure some stuff out. Let me know what you think. It's been a long time since I've been in a pep band but I learned many cheers. (Warning, lots of near-swears and a tad of implied obscenity follow.

Rick 'um Rack 'um Reek 'um Ruck 'um
Get that ball and really FIGHT!

That one might have come from Robin Williams, actually.

High school had some old standbys:

Strawberry Shortcake, Banana Split!
We think your team's full of
SHHHIFT to the left, Shift to the right!
Go Team Go! Fight Fight! Fight!

and

Cigarette Ashes, Cigarette Butts--
We got your team by the nuts!
PULL TEAM PULL

and that doesn't even try to be coy,

Ur-ine Ur-ine Yer-in-trouble!

In college we learned the blame game:

ALL YOUR FAULT --
ALL YOUR FAULT --

and the semi-onscene:

Get off your knees, ref,
you're blowing the game!

The following came from my University days, and they are pretty rich coming from a school so firmly on the second rung as Tufts...

That's all right, that's ok,
You'll all work for us someday!

and

Wine cooler, wine cooler,
Beer beer beer
You only go to _____
'Cause you couldn't get in here!

(where ___ is the name of the competing school.)

Finally one that will never set a crowd on fire but is kind of fun:

Rip off his arm and beat him over the head with the bloody stump!

---

Whenever I start reading Yelp reviews, I always regret it, generally immediately.

---

Suddenly Boston's all like BAM! TOURISTS!
(Tim Lincecum Pitching Mechanics in Slow Motion, via).

Baseball pitching is at the far end of human capability. Here is a neat piece on how some perceptual illusions help our selection of what to throw. (Also, like dogs, monkeys are foolable by pretending to throw, which the researchers take to mean they have ideas about the kinetic and mechanical aspects of the activity, even if they're not so good at it themselves.)

---

Dig the shytergy of copy and paste from Eclipse to Outlook- blue highlight background is included, so blue text is 100% camouflaged. DUH!

---

That's one of those theist defenses I never got. I'M arrogant? You just asked the creator of the universe to help you win a football game.

(for Ask an Atheist day, on the accusations of hubris)

--From these two discarded audition pieces for MAD asking what if Garfield and Peanuts took a Calvin + Hobbes approach to their subject matter? Great stuff!

---

http://www.macworld.com/article/150474/2010/04/ipad_not_for_everyone.html - good negative review of the iPad. For me, it's just a doodle pad

---

Little programs are delightful to write in isolation, but the process of maintaining large-scale software is always miserable.

---

Jaron Lanier in "You Are Not a Gadget" presents the idea of the "circle of empathy" (similar to Peter Singer's.) Basically, things inside the circle are similar enough to you that you want to see them protected, outside you don't care so much. He then states

The liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle.

Man! That's a good summary of why I always identify with liberals, even when some aspects of policy seem a bit misguided.

---

http://www.slate.com/id/2249306/ - Agatha Christie's beautifully "deranged", non-linear notebooks

---

http://weitz.de/regex-coach/ - a Windows tool for checking out your perl-ish regular expressions... intriguing...

---

"Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely."

---

---

When a big wave comes, lower your head and let it pass.

---

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix - beautiful music toy

---

Amused by the tit for tat of "French Kiss:English Kiss", "French Leave:English Leave" - "Oh those ghastly frenchmen" "non non, c'est vous!"

---

"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it."

I think I might be misunderestimating this whole getting ready to move thing a bit.

I try and think of it terms of Zen Detachment; I should not have a sense of connectedness with so many of these objects. I feel like taking a photo of my half completed efforts just to captain it "ZEN FAIL", but that's not particularly funny.

I've made some progress, and had a few times when I've been proud of my ability to let go, but there's a lot left over. I was going to say that it feels like "objects that have been a part of my history" should get more consideration than "objects I mean to get around to using some day", but who knows. Probably the proper Zen outlook would treat the past and the future about the same.

Such a Zen Dabbler. If I ain't sitting zazen, I don't think it has any choice of being Zen, but still I admire the outlook as filtered through California et al.

---

Old Chestnut of the Moment

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"

So, some people enjoy this as general anti-lawyer sentiment. But for a long time I had the idea that no, it's spoken by a character plotting revolution, and underscores the need for a good legal system in a fair society. Turns out that second interpretation is something of a lawyer's trick, it really is a bit of anti-lawyer jokery as the characters think about how to remake paradise on earth.

---

Dog of the Moment

--Remembering Laika, first earth creature in space, shown here along with a Russian doggy spacesuit of the time.

I watched "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" last night. Mean humor in parts, but legitimately funny; a guilty pleasure. Sacha Baron Cohen is fearless.

---

Prose Poem of the Moment

You can't write about grease paint and puddles of lovers or chained moons or brandy on knuckles or insanity but if you take a hot enough bath and lie on your back you can feel your blood swimming the crawl through your ass and if you play steel strings long enough you can feel your blood waltzing through your fingertips and if you let yourself laugh loud and hard enough so you're crying and peeing your pants you can feel your blood painting a self portrait on your stomach and it's a beautiful feeling

I took a 60 hour bus ride from rhode island to montana by myself and met a boy who bought me candy in fargo and said have a nice life and it would have made a great poem of passing except i ran into him again on a bus going to florida and it was as if fate had brought me back to that stringy tripping tongue studded sweetheart but he didn't remember the chocolate incident

This sticky stuff needs anger and passion and my stamp card isn't full yet but maybe if i could hate things worse than spinach and thunder i could be okay but spinach isn't so bad in pastries and thunder has a calming sensuality that i want to rip out of my ears so i can say thunder's the burning coals on my eyelashes and the ceramic clams in my fingernails making their way to my hair filling me with kasha and rhinestones

I went bowling with an old friend once and lost and that night he asked if i wanted to take the physical challenge or sleep and i couldn't for the life of me figure out what was so challenging about him when it was clear if i went to sleep he wouldn't call and if i took off my clothes he wouldn't call because we didn't keep in touch and anyway i wouldn't want to be the web of butterscotch between his hangnails

I only keep my shades in a jar so the tree on my desk can get light otherwise i'd spend all my time pining about a boy who could touch both my thumbs with one hand wear butterflies like he grew them in his eyes and kiss my ear like it was a flag but maybe i just need more sex in my life or cigarettes or salmon or Stephen but i think if i could just duct tape all of them to the bottom of my shoe my feet'd get some mileage

I sang with Sara in sQ at Tufts. I put this work on the Love Blender a while back, but as I was through my music collection on iTunes and rating everything it hit me that I wanted to post this here, because it really is great. A while back ClassicGaming.com published my review of the obscure-ish C=64 classics Crossroads and Crossroads II... but somehow I neglected to mention the games author, Steve Harter. Recently I found a different tribute page by a gal named dessgeega... (her site is also the source of yesterday's Starfox 2 link)...in later correspondance she mentioned that Steve Harter had written her about her site. It turns out Steve was amenable to an e-mail conversation with me, and agreed to let me edit into the interview format below. (Anything that doesn't seem to flow, that's due to my faults as an interview editor...)

---

How old were you when you wrote Crossroads? Did you do anything else for the C=64, or any other of those systems?

I was 17 at the time when I developed CR1. I also did a couple more "magazine" games unrelated to Crossroads for the C64. They basically helped my pay for college (in computer science of course).

Really?? How well did those magazines pay?

I said "helped pay" ;) For CR2 it was like $5,000 including upfront and royalties but back in the 80s that went a long way...

I kick myself though for not trying to make Crossroads a bit better and getting a cartridge publisher -- I assume the royalties would have been much better.

Could be! Though I never thought of the C=64 as being much of a cartridge machine. And, in retrospect, I think Crossroads was retro even then or maybe... arcade-y, relative to that era's trend of longer games with bigger and more involved worlds.

I wonder if I worked on the cartridge version if I would have tried to do a big world too... something with a story line or an arena playoff theme perhaps with a real ending (not just a game over) --

How well was the game received?

I got a few fan letters forwarded from Compute -- for one kid I gave him a workaround so he could have more than 9 shields because he was upset that the other characters could have more than 9 (he was right).

As a gamer, I'm mostly interested in multiplayer games through the ages, and Crossroads has a fantastic Co-op or Compete factor. Plus I've noticed that most any game that does a good job of throwing a swarm of enemies at you tends to catch my attention. I've always said that Crossroads was special for making you feel like just one more monster type among other monsters....

I really enjoy playing games with other (human) players -- all of the four games I created for the C64 were two-player simultaneous that basically limited the game to an overhead view (before split screen became feasible)

I've always admired how skillfully Crossroads uses the C=64's character graphics, especially with having characters move in half-character steps, other character-based games weren't so fine-grained... Did your ideas about the possibilities of character-based graphics drive the design of the game, or vice-versa?

The idea of a lot of characters moving around the screen with AI interested me such as Robotron and Wizard of Wor. But making a Robotron-style game perform for the c64 would have been impossible due to all of the pixel blits and collision detection needed since there could only be 8 sprites. So I started tinkering with a Wizard of Wor style game that could use characters instead of pixel blits or sprites and thus thought of using one- and two-character transition animation.

Did you come up with all the monsters and names on your own?

I created all everything in the game on my own (characters, sounds, etc) but Compute named the characters and did the magazine artwork.



Do you recall how the monster allies/enemies rules worked? Were some especially bitter rivals? How did the AI work in general?

Well the yellow, red and blue were friends, light tan guy and horse thing were friends, two grey soldiers were friends, I think the rest were enemies. Nothing in the AI for being more bitter over one enemy vs. another

The core AI aspects of CR are based on how far he can see, if he runs or chases other enemies and who the friends are. I wish I could have done more here, such as worms that would take up more than one character block. I also wish I would have made one change to the game: for an "eating" character I wish I would have given him an extra shield every time he took one from someone. It would have completely changed the game.

That snake I idea sounds awesome... but those eating lemonsharks were tough already!

How did you manage to keep the players moving at a constant speed, even as the monsters were slogged down?

For the constant speed of the two players and their bullets, I basically set a "heartbeat" variable in the interrupt loop (every 1\60th sec) that the main (infinite) loop checked after every non-player character was displayed. The player's bullets move at full speed so if you look at the player's bullets every 1\60th of a second they move one half of a character. There is also an algorithm used to speed up the other characters over time based upon another heartbeat variable.

Oh, so the speedup isn't just a byproduct of a fully loaded processor? I was thinking about Lore Sjoeberg's Book of Ratings quote about Space Invaders:

As you killed off the low-res interplanetary menace, the remaining would-be conquerors, fueled by revenge and freed-up CPU cycles, would steadily increase in speed, until one last Invader would be zipping across your screen like a Yorkie on crystal meth.

I always thought that applied to CR as well...

It does increase in speed if characters are killed too fast, but eventually will slow down if you don't keep killing more of them too fast. I don't remember the algorithm off the top of my head, but it adjusts a tiny bit faster\slower every few seconds to try to find the best fit for the current level and how long you have been playing the current level. The first level starts out painfully slow for the little players, and I think by level 16 or so it is running at full speed even with a few enemies.

Such attention to detail!

What about those cool explosions? Are those sprites, or direct pixel drawing, or what?

The explosions\implosions are sprites. I now wish I wouldn't have displayed the score at the end though -- too korny. To save magazine space, the sprites are randomly created during bootstrapping so are different every time you run the game. I think there are four sets of explosions generated so they also vary for a single game session too.

Did that mean there were only 8 explosions possible at once?

Yes, they just cycle through

Did you do line of site for monsters? I was thinking that limited vision, besides being more realistic, also would mean less computation.

Yes I think the blue fleas could only see like 4-5 spaces which definitely cut down on the computation

I remember trying to pick up assembly programming on the C=64 but it totally kicked my pre-adolescent butt... I finally manged to make my own game for the Atari 2600 in ASM, and even though it's known to be a tough platform, in some ways the stripped-down environment might be easier to get a handle on...

I would dread coding the 2600, I agree that it would be harder IMO to write a playable game on the 2600 than the C64. The C64's support for customizable character set, SID, sprites, smooth scrolling and memory size just made it an awesome game machine at the time. I learned ASM because BASIC was just too slow for anything. Two books I couldn't have lived without were "mapping the 64" and a 6510 assembly language reference (I still have these). I actually used Compute's crappy free LADS assembler because I was too poor to buy one (thus the reason why I got into cheap paper magazine games).

Other tidbits about the game:
1) In CR2 the dog at level 20 becoming stronger and aggressive
2) I put my initials in one of the mazes in CR2, as did Randy T. did for the sample maze in the Maze Editor he wrote for CR2
3) There is also a rare bug that causes a hidden wall to be added, but I didn't try too hard to fix that since I thought it was an interesting effect
4) CR1 doesn't have my name in the game because Compute blanked it out before publishing. The CR2 version I sent Compute did not have my name scroll by, but if someone typed in the program from the magazine or if the game detected the loader for those who bought the disk then my name was shown. The check for the typed-in program worked because Compute always put 0's in the last few fill bytes of the last line of program but they were normally 255's in memory. So I basically got my name there without them knowing about it.

That's really clever, I love it! About that loyal dog... would it ever turn on you if you shot it? (Or am I just thinking of Nethack?)

No it doesn't turn on you... It would have been funny though. It's been a while since I've gotten to level 20+ though...

What do you think of the Crossroads fansites, and the interest in retro gaming in general?

Just a couple years ago I installed a C64 emulator with the CR2 ROM and got teary eyed (it was probably 10 years prior to that the last time I fired up my C64 and played it). I also got teary eyed the first time I got MAME working and played some old classics. So I definitely understand this retro gaming thing. Today I enjoy playing CR2 via emulator with my 7-year old son -- it's funny but he can beat me at Mario Kart but doesn't have a chance against me in CR2.

Have you seen XRoads, a port of the game to X-Windows?

I never tried try the XRoads port but would like to. I gotta get started on the port to a modern console ;-) I think it would be cool though to create the retro port plus a newer, online version of the game where each character could be a real person.

Well, thanks very much for your time and insightful answers!

Thank you, it's been fun talking about this

---

Dessgeega's tribute page has a video of the gameplay, and my classicgaming.com review has the downloads...it's worth checking out, this game didn't receive nearly enough attention.

Geekery of the Moment
Before the hike Andy mentioned he thought that conventional wisdom was that Java was kind of passé at this point, though he couldn't name what was supposedly taking its place. Shawn, who was actually a technical recruiter for a bit, disagreed, though we all agree that Java isn't too cool for desktop apps, and that J2EE, especially EJB, isn't that well loved.

I found the TIOBE Programming Community Index, which tries to quantify the popularity of programming languages based on "availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors". (Hmm, I think a lot of us would be more interested in job listings, not skilled engineers...) Java and Perl, my favorites, are near the top. Overall I'm kind of suspicious of the methodlogy, or maybe it's just meant to be for managers more than for the coders themselves.

Any opinions on what's good to focus on going into the future is welcome. PHP might be finally maturing...it definately didn't feel ready for prime time when I learned a bit of it back in 2002. It is nice that it has all the libraries built-in. (Paul Graham thinks that can really push a language.) Like if I wanted to port and enhance my personal online flat-table database app, make it a serious opensource thing...would PHP or Java/JSP be a better bet for me, career-wise and then just from an "ease of distribution" standpoint?

---

Article of the Moment
Slate on The Most Popular Baby Names of 2015--interesting study in how they map to economic levels. (Effect more so than cause.) Is "Aviva" really a name people are considering? It sounds like a prescription medication or maybe a dot com.

My favorite hypothetical baby name continues to be "Sky". So my hypothetical child can hate me forever, of course.

Geekery of the Moment
Math oddity: it hit me last night that subtraction is more powerful than addition, because if you do enough subtractions (from zero) you can do addition, but there's no way to do subtraction by doing a lot of additions. For example, if I want to add 3 and 5, I could subtract 3 from zero (-3), subtract 5 from that (-8), then subtract that total from zero (8). But I can't think of anyway of doing subtraction via addition, except for saying "add the negative of" which seems to be quietly invoking multiplication or worse. (This hit me because of Assembly Programming, where often subtracting a number from zero is the easiest way to get the negative of a number, and you have to do slightly different setup before adding than you do for subtracting.)

There's a parallel thing with division being able to emulate multiplication but not vice versa, though it breaks down when one of the numbers is zero.

---

Quote of the Moment

Ladies undergarments.

And now he's in some utterly stupid Victoria's Secret Ads! I never 'got' him anyway. Rock of the Moment




Back when I was around 6 or so, my dad brought me this rock he had found on a walk. We were living in Salamanca, NY, near the Seneca nation of Indians, and we thought the imprints on it might be American Indian related. The folks at the Seneca Museum said no, it was likely more a fossil of old life. I never quite believed it, but now that I think about it, It would be a kind of random thing for an Indian to inscribe, even a group that used bows to hunt.

---

Quote of the Moment

"Be not ashamed of yielding to televised golf's soporific power. Stay keen to the drama, but don't be shy about letting the commentary and pace waft you to lotus land during those slow, four-hour Saturdays and Sundays when the also-rans are stumbling by and the announcers are still trying to get excited. Some of my fondest golf-on-TV memories involve me waking up with a startled slurp thanks to a roar from the gallery."

Before this, I had zero urge to watch, but the way he puts it makes it seem almost Zen-like.

---

Article of the Moment
Another, more topical Slate piece, a warning: Christian Fundies stay the hell out of Iraq. Interestng use of bible refrences at the end.

---

Link of the Moment
The Institute of Official Cheer reviews Big Little Books, ungodly lame hybrid of novels and comics. (Via a letter on Gone and Forgotten, funny, funny reviews of terrible comics.) Quote of the Moment

The Taliban, the most friendly people in the world, possibly the universe

According to Joey AccordionGuy deVilla who pointed this out, the main differences between this and a typical IRC client is the 5-times-a-day call to prayer, the way it's hardwired to certain IRC "channels", and "cute little factoids that you can cut-and-paste into heated arguments with infidel dogs".

---

Funny of the Moment
An informative alt.fan.cecil-adams article on DIY high end marital aids.

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.