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Speaking of movies I think I saw on a plane...I think about the "Toe Pick" scene from "The Cutting Edge" alot.

(The hockey player trying to change into a figure skater keeps getting stymied by the "toe pick" brake bit that figure skates have and hockey skates do not.) Make way for ducklings? More like ducklings making their way for us!! (Melissa and I got hella lucky with our new place, this pond is a 5 minute drive or half hour walk away!)








(Melissa couldn't head out with me and band buddies today, that's Sophie and Matt)

"Now wait," he interrupted before Richard even had a chance to start, "don't I vaguely remember that you had some sort of computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?"

"Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but..."

"Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus," said Reg. "In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work."

"So an electric one would be particularly pointless," said Richard.

"True enough," conceded Reg.

"There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble," said Richard, "but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil."

Reg looked at him quizzically.

"I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply," he said. "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting."

"I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.

Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"

"It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."

"So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K machine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but what was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it to do. I virtually wrote my own word processor in BASIC. A simple search and replace routine would take about three hours."

"I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?"

"Well, not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why not were absolutely fascinating [...]"

This anecdote - in particular the "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting" line - has always stuck with me, and I thought of it when I was talking about programming to a friend (she brought up a lesson she had had at computer camp, where you have to give painstakingly step-by-step directions for making a peanut butter sandwich to another camper who has to follow them extremely literally.)

I do think that anyone who can write down a recipe a beginner can follow is in good shape to try programming. Been thinking a bit about Revelation. Saturday I was discussing my takeaway from Elaine Pagels' book about it, which is the irony that even though it is so revered by so many (Gentile, not particularly semitic) Christians today, it spends its first part taking a strong stance for a partisan "Christianity needs to be seen as an outgrowth of Judaism" view (vs "Gentiles are the bestest Christians") but that part is usually glossed over by most readers, who are generally looking for the future juicy, scary and vengeful stuff. (Actually, "readers" isn't the right term. As a preteen I got through one of those "read the whole Bible in a year!" plans, but I think that level of reading is uncommon in most churches these days - many churchgoers seem content with the little cherry picked excerpts you get in service. Which, if true (and I shouldn't speak too broadly, I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions) is kind of a return to the old "Mystery" days where the actual texts were reserved for the learned few...)

An early 1980s Sunday School class about the subject, including an illustration of a Christian in front of a firing squad along with other terrors to come, left me with an indelible association of Christianity with future horrors, especially if you don't act right (all the Jesus acceptance and born-again-ness) and even if you do. Which then fed into a disdain I still carry for "pre-tribs", folks who think the Christians get swept away to their eternal happiness before all the shit goes down, because God must love us too much to let that happen to US, right? (I have bitterness when pop-religion seems to sugarcoat the source material - the way a "Grampas looking down from us in Heaven right now, Timmy" view seems more grounded in consoling hopefulness than the actual scriptures - my church's 11th and final doctrine was "We believe in the immortality of the soul; in the resurrection of the body; in the general judgment at the end of the world; in the eternal happiness of the righteous; and in the endless punishment of the wicked." I realized that that view of a bodily resurrection and a judgement at the END of the things is more caught in "Man of Constant Sorrow"'s final verse ("as I lay sleeping in my grave") than most of the songs I had been singing in Sunday School... and so I'm both envious of and sometimes a little disdainful of folks who have a softer, gentler form of Christianity, even as I realize I can't be sure their view is less reliable than mine harsh one - it's certainly more pragmatic and psychologically sound, whether or not it feels like wishful thinking to me.)

A few years ago I ran into the idea of Preterism, the idea that the stuff in Revelation happened along with the destruction of the Temple in 70CE. (Heh - compare that to the tongue-in-cheek pop-culture idea that Mayans were right, time ended in 2012 and now we're just watching things fall apart.) Anyway, I wish I had a better feel for this view, I can't read the fantastical and completely apocalyptic imagery outside of the lens of a "guide to future events" that has stoked both way too much of my childhood fears and informed too much of our foreign policy in the Middle East...

Man, this ramble got longer than I expected when I found an old blog note on "Preterism". I'll leave you with a reference to APOCAMON - the first few pages are rough, implying sexual abuse of John of Patmos by Roman soldiers, but then gets into a fascinatingly literal illustration of the warring angelic and demonic forces of the final battle.

OK, finally finally, I remember this quote:

Pick up a reggae album at random. Any reggae album. Listen to it and you will find a far more accurate, reliable and theologically sound exegesis of the meaning of Babylon than you will ever get from Tim LaHaye or any other so-called 'prophecy expert.'

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Who wore it better: Children detained in McAllen, Texas or Ivanka Trump pic.twitter.com/atifVrteeY

— Orli Matlow (@HireMeImFunny) June 18, 2018

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Hank Azaria on his voices. Man, I love voicework. I don't have a careful enough ear to be good at accents, but putting on voices is such a good way for even wannabe funny guys like me to temporarily change persona... Panorama, waiting for Kellie (and Anna) at Kellie's Surprise Party...

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It was true I always had trouble listening and remembering, trouble hearing people when they explained simple facts to me. When I read, my head seemed to go diagonal, and I swore I saw things in the sentences--not what I was supposed to see. When I read the words "moonlit swim," I saw the moonlight slicked all over the bare skin. The word "sunshine" had a washed look, with the sweep of a rag in the middle of it. The word "violinist" was a fig cut in half. "String quartet" was a cat's cradle held between two hands. "Penniless" was an empty copper outline and "prettiness" seemed to glitter. "Calamity" was alarm bells, and in "aristocrat" there was the sharp triangle of a cravat, and in "sea serpent" one loop of the green muscle. It was as if I could read the surfaces of words, and their real hearts, but not their information. Even "word" had a picture--I saw a blond hostess in a spangled dress turning black and white letters over one by one. When I read, the meaning swam and the images leaped out and the words gave up their doubles. When I wrote, the same thing happened with the paper.

The book is memoirs of the poet, taking its name from her father's situation, who via an odd loophole of priestly conversion was a married-with-children Catholic Priest. Funny and sometimes heartbreaking I'd recommend it. I liked this passage, kind of a synesthesia of words.

Throughout Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and North Germany, tradition associates some animal with every church, and it goes by the name of Kirk-Grim. These Kirk-Grims are the goblin apparitions of the beasts that were buried under the foundation-stones of the churches. It is the same in Devonshire--the writer will not say at the present day, but certainly forty or fifty years ago. Indeed, when he was a boy he drew up a list of the Kirk-Grims that haunted all the neighbouring parishes. To the church of the parish in which he lived, belonged two white sows yoked together with a silver chain; to another, a black dog; to a third, a ghostly calf; to a fourth, a white lamb.

Afzelius, in his collection of Swedish folk-tales, says: "Heathen superstition did not fail to show itself in the construction of Christian churches. In laying the foundations, the people retained something of their former religion, and sacrificed to their old deities, whom they could not forget, some animal, which they buried alive, either under the foundation or without the wall. The spectre of this animal is said to wander about the churchyard at night, and is called the Kirk-Grim. A tradition has also been preserved that under the altar of the first Christian churches, a lamb was usually buried, which imparted security and duration to the edifice. This is an emblem of the true Church Lamb--the Saviour, who is the Corner-Stone of His Church. When anyone enters a church at a time when there is no service, he may chance to see a little lamb spring across the quire and vanish. This is the church-lamb. When it appears to a person in the churchyard, particularly to the grave-digger, it is said to forbode the death of a child."

Thiele, in his "Danish Folk-tales," says much the same of the churches in Denmark. He assures us that every church there has its Kirk-Grim, which dwells either in the tower, or in some other place of concealment.

Ah, vacation, when a glance at the bedside clock displaying "7:47" says "heh an airplane" and not "crap gotta get moving"

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Why There's No Conservative Jon Stewart Some of the theories aren't so satisfying, but I think the ones near the end are true; at the heart of good liberalism is a willingness to second guess that's friendlier with more sophisticated comedy.

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If you follow every dream you might get lost.

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I like this poem (Acceptance Speech by David Yezzi. I also like the name David Yezzi.) "Typical" OKGO analog visual wizardry and wonderfulness; plus I find the lyrics kind of moving.

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And anyway, when did sexual attraction become the sole metric for physical beauty? Is a sunset 'ugly' just because you don't want to fuck it? What about a waterfall? A horse? Ireland? A song?

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Never compare your daily grind to someone else's highlight reel.

Interactive Panorama of yesterday's rainbow

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The sudden realization that Hodor might be a Pokemon.

-Two weekends ago my friend and I installed a new stereo in my car. Last weekend, Amber's brother Brendan showed me this video.

Maybe I should have added a subwoofer, too?

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I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job...Because, he will find an easy way to do it.

click to play

paintworms - - built with processing
Paint with the mouse and you make a paint worm that then tries to head to the center...space bar clears... a little toy for KotMK #48 So, it's once again time for me to post the 3,4, or 5 star music I added to my collection over the proceeding 3 months. I love how iDevices let me have a closer relation to my music, but I want to make sure new stuff doesn't get lost in the shuffle (so to speak) so every season I make a new playlist of just the new tunes that I listen to over and over so the songs have a fighting chance for long term familiarity with me.

I'm always amazed that I can find Youtube videos for all of this. I usually go for original version videos, but accept live when that's all there is. And, crazily enough, here I am, singing "Fat Bottomed Girls" at the sQ! alum show at Tufts' Goddard Chapel...
Err, I'm in the back left, behind the really tall guy, popping out from time to time. The "first generation" Qs sang the first verse, I guess we were supposed to mosey forward but this was crazily under-rehearsed... (though Amber got to hear me listen to sQ's and Queen's version over and over as I tried to learn it on the way back from Cleveland.)

So, in other music... two songs got a 5 star Rating (50 songs out of around 1900)

• Back to Me (Kathleen Edwards) - cmg introduced me to this one- nice innuendo, and I love the dramatic tension between the confidence of the narrator and the scenario implied
• S.M.D.U. (feat. Blur Song 2) (Brock Landers) - I posted this video earlier, took me a while to hunt down the mix it came from

I got a ton of music from Amber this time, she has some terrific mixes. (Mostly I downloaded fresh MP3s - it's finding out the music that's the trick, rather than saving a buck)

• Casimir Pulaski Day (Sufjan Stevens) - very bittersweet
• The Girl You Lost To Cocaine (Sia) -almost a 5, great sound
• Little Black Sandals (Sia) - Another great song except I keep thinking it's "Little Black Sambo"
• Hey, Soul Sister (Train) - this one keeps popping up random places
• Umbrella (Remix) (Rihanna featuring Lil Mama) - Favorite mix of the 4 or 5 versions Amber inherited.
• Hotel Song (Regina Spektor)
• Samson (Regina Spektor) --Regina has such a sweet sadness, she's one of my new favorite artists.
• Boyz (M.I.A.)
• 5 Years (Bjork) -like how this sounds like an Atari
• Blister In The Sun (Violent Femmes) -kind of a classic
• I Don't Live In A Dream (Jackie Greene)
• Black Swan (Thom Yorke)
• Into Dust (Mazzy Star)
• Fade Into You (Mazzy Star)-I might've heard Mazzy Star a long while back
• Cross Bones Style (Cat Power)
• Close To Me (Closer Mix) (The Cure)
• 1234 (Feist)
• 15 Step (Radiohead)

Sometimes I'll remember a random song from Marching Band Days and hunt it down...

• Holding Out For A Hero (Bonnie Tyler)
• Holding Out For A Hero (Frou Frou) - Weirdly from the Shrek Soundtrack

Movie soundtracks are often great sources of new stuff, most of these were from "Whip It" or in explorations around there...

• Keys to the City (Album) (The Go! Team)
• Doing It Right (The Go! Team)
• Lollipop [Squeak E. Clean & Desert Eagles Remix] (The Chordettes)
• Jolene (Dolly Parton)

And older stuff from "An Education"

• Tell The Truth (Ray Charles, starting around 2:00)
• Comin' Home Baby (Mel Tormé)

Random

• Local God (2004 Digital Remaster) (Everclear) - Romeo/Juliet
• What's The Attitude (Cut Chemist Featuring Hymnal)
• Sexy Bitch (Featuring Akon;explicit) (David Guetta - Akon) - I think Kjersten showed me this
• Suddenly Last Summer (The Motels) - My UU Group did a "most romantic song" event, this was one of the member's bit of cheesy 80s romance...
• P.I.M.P. [Explicit] (50 Cent) -- Actually I'm still kind of looking for the background mashup in this Penny Arcade drawing video
• Beautiful, Dirty, Rich (Lady Gaga) - I remember hearing this at FYE at Downtown Crossing...

The thing is I had so much music this season tht for most of May I put off actually adding in the music I ran into, so the Summer playlist is probably a bit inflated from where it would be otherwise.

Anyway, this is all some great music. Let me know if you want an MP3 of anything...

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I took a city that was known for pornography and licked it to a large extent.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNREP5l4xTw - anyone know what version of "P.I.M.P" is playing behind Penny Arcade's Gabe drawing Boba Fett?

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Come to think of it, I'm kind of bummed none of the virtual drum sets I encounter have a "marching drumline" soundset with 4 distinct bass drums and quads. Got the iPhone OS update yesterday... now I'm cutting and pasting and going into landscape mode like a fiend! One of the other updates was a new app "Voice Memos"... I already had an app of the exact same name, and I thought I'd go ahead and transcribe the things I had languishing in that older app before deleting it:

Dream where, uh, it's almost like a superhuman scourge on the city, or whatever, like there's like human locusts that go to like trading floors and conference centers, and businesses, strip it down to the floors like a bunch of locusts. Uh Then they go to the streets, they drive around, in these giant vehicles, you know, these great big construction vehicles, just plow through dirt and mud, and tear down signs, it's just weird.

Scrabble is to words what "Guitar Hero" is to music

The trouble with putting the patch formalism into SR to GR is that it is a long and complex answer to a question nobody has asked

Nerds, and those uh, cartoons from "Great Space Coaster" - they were a total influence to how I was drawing as a kid.

what was the song, "down on the corner, out in the street, something something" -- also the line about the "nickel down"

Ok, so with Lin, his thing with naming his bed "The Word" so he could say he was late because he felt he needed to spend more time in "The Word" that morning.

Veronika's story about the Y2K Nutella and the Phhwwwt! sound, and stuff

Story idea with the guy guarding the tomb, uhh, of Jesus, and he manages to keep Jesus inside, har har har.

_____'s story about his father going a little nuts, taking a trip to Mars, and the astro van, and the canal, and the mars bars...

So Jonathan woke me from a dream, told us about, this thing about a Game and Watch store display, maybe it had the "Braid" rewind mechanic, also paint every corner...and someone wanted to take my picture, like some fan boy of mine, who know I did this shit, but we had to turn on the light, maybe Trevor was there, maybe Joe, someone... anyway.

TVtropes "boomers" for "kick the puppy"

lookup "indexed annuity" funds

The freemasons just told me did you know they believe a man's worth can be measured, and its not his power or wealth? why yes... it's the SIZE of his JOHNSON!

do do doot do doot doot de doot doot -- doot de do doot do doot do doot... doot de doot da doot doot de doot doot, doot de doot doot de doot ...

bumper sticker: "god bless the whole world. no exceptions"

the logo of 222nd street jazz

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3:06 Saturday Afternoon... Carla hereby relinquishes the right to bitch about her sunburn.

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I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.

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http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/06/17/iphone-30-software-walkthrough/ - best iPhone 3.0 rundown I've seen. But - why "shake to shuffle"?

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http://manolobrides.com/2009/06/18/lovehate-the-its-a-long-story-edition/ - supercool wedding invite YEAH CELTICS!

Man, that was AMAZING.

I'm still at risk for being a fair-weather fan, but when the weather is this good, why the hell not?

I know I'm biased, but I think defensive basketball IS more fun to watch, at least for a sophomore-level of fan. A freshman fan just sees the strength and glory of driving to the basket, dunking or getting the layup, or maybe a 3 point shot from downtown, and there might be nuances in setting up an offense to let those glamorous plays happen that I just don't see, but when I see the Celtics defense in action, shifting, rearranging, countering every possible move the Lakers could make before they tried to make it... it's a thing of beauty, like a complex and intricate piece of clockwork that happens to be made of sweaty gangly guys in squeaky shoes.

Of course, that was only the first half of last nights game.. most of the second half was "garbage time", the Lakers running desperate hurry-up plays, trying to recapture some dignity in the final store, and the Celtics mirroring that with fun-to-watch, why-the-hell-not dunks and what not.

Dunno how related it is to being so near the infamous-party/rioters at Northeastern, but the power was out last night and this morning... I loved the commercial, on a few minutes before the end, with Celtics players asking, in effect "come on guys, show some class and don't riot, OK?"

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Link of the Moment
The Boston Globe's Scoring Graph and Shot Chart is a nice study in information presentation, the graph is a timeline that lets you see the point differential and the important events throughout the game. The shot chart was a little confusing 'til I read more closely and saw the big dots w/ the player #s were the ones of the crucial second quarter.

Enjoy it Boston! City sports just can't get too many levels better than it has been for most of this decade... they plotted the parade route already.

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Heh, first quarter of the Celtics game on the car radio, a convoy of police paddy wagons driving the other way... In a fit of diet geekness and introversion, I went over all the records I could think of, journal entries, Usenet posts, old diet logs, to get as many data points about my weight over the last past decade or so. After failing to figure out how to get a chart in OpenOffice's knockoff of Excel (I hate Excel) I put together some Perl, which was good because I might be making some online tools for shorter term weighted averages, so it was useful experience. What I came up with was this:

The real shocker was how I put on 20 pounds in about a year! I had a reading of 204 from April 6, 2005, and then at the end of this May I was at 227. That's pretty dang quick, and I didn't have an indication that I was stabilizing at some weight up there, so I don't know how high it would have gone. "Recent" low is 179, in late 2001. I'll wait 'til I get around there again and then consult with my doctor and see what my goal weight should be. Might take a while though, easily not until the winter holidays.

Dorky self-cheering of the moment... after looking at these charts, my advice to any investors in Kirk Being So Fat should SELL! SELL!

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Culinary Delight of the Moment
Speaking of eating, Daniel Gross wrote

John Snow will have a replacement, and he may very well come from the corporate world. But if it's an A-list Wall Street CEO, I'll buy a copy of Dow 36,000 and eat the first chapter.

and that's exactly what happened. Yum! I like how they prepared it as a salad.

Article of the Moment

All such content - as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes - was banished in the first of the prequels ("Episode I: The Phantom Menace," 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don't even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.

It's an interesting point; the first trilogy was also supposed to be "powerpoint", except the rest of the movie universe wasn't explained, so it seemed much biggger than the "yeah, Darth built 3CP0 back in the day and Chewbacca fought along side Yoda and Boba's dad is the model for the troops" etc etc. Had a long talk with EB last night. He's a more insightful guy than you might expect. One of the main points was he thinks I need to get better at recognizing competitive situations, and then decide if I'm going to compete or disengage, but if I do the latter, do so more knowledgeably than with my usual fear-of-losing redefine-the-competition approach. In some ways, sometimes for better but often for worse, that fear-of-losing thing is a defining characteristic of my life. It's kind of a misapplication of that old "better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than open it and remove all doubt" saw...except in my case, it's more about better to give a half-hearted effort and see what comes up than to have one's limitations outlined in stark relief. At its heart, it's a terrible ego thing; I think I'm subconsciously convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I'm always the smartest guy in the room (and when there is evidence to the contrary, my belief in the theory of multiple intelligences--which is actually a nice multipolar way of looking at the world--lets me redefine "smart") and work to shield myself from anything that would prove me wrong on that.

One unpleasant side effect of that is I'm not a good loser, at least for stuff I've worked at at all. (Like, a board game I don't like, I have less stake in, so I probably preemptively disengage a tad, and can just follow the rule of "if you can't do something well enjoy doing it badly".) When a video game or round of darts is going badly, I'm the most sometimes angry and sometimes whiny (and sometimes both) S.O.B. around. Why is that? Dunno. Historical evidence suggest EB and I are fairly evenly matched in both fields...(Hmm, one thing I didn't think of last night is I am a bit better at say, multiplayer video games when things don't go well. Unfortunately, either because I have more experience at the specific games, or just spent more years at gaming in general, I'm usually better at any given game than many of my gaming buddies, but most of them take it with good grace.) Why should it get on my nerves that I might not be the best darts player in the car, when I so freely admit I'm not the best on in Cambridge, or Boston Metro, or New England, or any other reasonable level of competition?

So I'm trying to figure out where all this comes from, both the general overview and the sense of whiny rivalry. EB has a few theories, from what he knows of my background. One of the most interesting is--and even if it's not quite the root of this, I think it might start to answer some questions I was recently asking about how my father's debilitating illness and death when I was a teenager affects my way of dealing with others now--is this concept that I never got a chance to "beat Dad" at stuff. EB recognizes that Oedipal Conflict and Freudian thought in general is out of vogue, often for good reasons, but still thinks there's something to a normal male development stage of gettin' better than yer old man at something, whether it's one-on-one basketball or academic pursuits or what have you, and the time of doing that directly was denied to me. (I guess this presumes it can't easily happen posthumously...my dad raised a pretty high bar in the way he went from a bit of a backwoods boy to a very refined and educated man, collecting art--prints,mostly--in a meaningful way, doing national championship level needlework, and generally acquiring an amazing set of skills and diverse cultural interests. (Come to think about it, I did a write up on those things a year ago that tried to do justice to what he accomplished.))

Another place it might come from is not wanting to admit the world just isn't fair. (And EB thinks a certain kind of Christian upbringing, extremely egalitarian, might feed into this.) Somewhere out there, there's someone smarter, richer, better-looking, more-well-hung, better-adjusted, a better writer, more creative, luckier...and, undoubtedly, all of the above, and more...there's some growing up I have to do about making the best of the talents I do have. And I the problem isn't those talents per se; I definitely have a lot of raw intelligence and creativity and many other things; the problem is I have such a mixed record in the "making the best of" department. Sometimes a desire not to know my own limits has led me into a kind of drifting lack-of-drive, lack-of-competition way of being that in some ways has worked out ok for me, but in some ways hasn't.

Yikes, this went on for a bit, eh? Let me know what you think.

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Sellout of the Moment
Wow. I had gathered that Garfield was pretty commercial and made by committee and by-the-numbers and all that (despite liking it a lot when I was like, 7) but I had no idea it was always so planned...

Stupid note of the moment...I would have said "when I was like 8" but the 8) looked too much like I was trying to make a glasses-wearing smilie. Image of the Moment

Screendoor Moth. I added a larger version to my desktop wallpaper page, it's what I'm using now.

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Article of the Moment
We're All Gonna Die!, "a skeptical guide to Doomsday" from Wired. A great article...sometimes I'm amazed that Wired gives mostly all their content away for free on their website. (I'm very fond of Wired, they started up just about the same time I was getting online, so I feel like we've grown up together...)

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Exchange of the Moment

On the same lines, is it possible that the incredible amounts of caffeine ingested by American society might also be a contributing factor in the uprise of ADD/ADHD? It just seems like a possiblity to me.

If caffeine caused mental problems, I'd be the fucking Rain Man of Dr Pepperville.

Not that it's not a serious issue for many people, but it's amazing how almost everyone can come up positive on some of the more primitive Q+A tests they have for it. Someone there linked to a thought-provoking table Hunter and Farmers, which argues that folks with ADHD might just be "hunter" types trying to live the "farmer" lifestyle our culture is now based on. News Link of the Moment
Making the rounds, a proposal to invade the Netherlands should we have to bust our boys out of the hooscow at the International Criminal Court in The Hague! Hopefully this legislation won't be passed. I love how the big powers (US and China) hold themselves above this whole matter. (The counterargument is the big countries don't want to let smaller countries with grudges bring politically-motivated lawsuits...still the whole idea that the soldiers of the major powers aren't subject to the same watchdogs shows a great deal of hubris. Right up there with our divine right to topple the government of Iraq.)

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Funny of the Moment
The Onion had the funniest Red Meat cartoon I've seen in a while.

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Movie Quote of the Moment

You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.

Image of the Moment
--from Dribbleglass.com Billboards We'd Like to See.

Man, I hate Harley Hogs. (Or is it "Hawgs"?) A machine that takes so much joy in being so disruptive to everything around it is just obnoxious. After one rips through my neighborhood, I try to restore the karmic balance by mocking the breed... this is easily accomplished by holding out one's hands as if they were gripping handlebars and then turning one of the hands to mime the twisting of the throttle, synchronized with making the fart noises an eight year old takes such pleasure in. (The syncronization is the key to the gag.)

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Quote of the Moment

I've seen monkey shit fights at the zoo that were more organized than THIS.

Seems like a useful quote for many situations.

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Link of the Moment
As long as we're in a cussing mood here, it's Fucked Weblog, a kind of functional parody of FuckedCompany. The latter tracks dotcoms going down in flames, (like this report on Event Zero, where I used to work) while the former reports the shutdown of web based journals.

Blogs come and blogs go, hopefully this one will stay for a long while; I consider it a continuation of the quote journal I kept on my PalmPilot since early 1997, so there's some hope I think.