❮❮prevnext❯❯

The one thing most Americans can agree on is that a large portion of the population seems to be trying to destroy the country. We just can't agree on which portion it is.

Still true today.

---

Marty, stay here with me... happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

---

People say that jealousy is the greatest enemy of love. They're wrong. The greatest enemy of love is boredom.

Boston Globe: This band plans to drown out the Men's March against abortion with a ruckus -- "I'm not sure if playing a tuba will change the world," said one musician, "but being a second force behind other activists might." (SPOILER: the musician was me)

	Everything's Sweet Kai Straw	Just a decent modern song.
★ ★ ★ ★	Seven Nation Army (feat. Alice Russell) Nostalgia 77	Rayyan posted this one. It makes at least my seventh version of Seven Nation Army...
★ ★ ★ ★	You Want It Darker Leonard Cohen	Super deep and dark song with religious overtones, via the trailer for "Bones and All"
	Ghostbusters Run-DMC	Kinda by the numbers rap version of the classic theme.
★ ★ ★ ★	In Love With the World Aura Dione	Mostly here because I dig the concept of "you're in love with a girl who's in love with the world"
★ ★ ★ ★	Skeleton Sam LVCRFT	from the soundtrack to "Hocus Pocus 2" that my friend Sophie is an extra in.
★ ★ ★ ★	Take over Your World The Party Band	Great, great, great closer for a local HONK favorite. Has that SNL-ending closer energy... take over your world / make it a better place / do real good things / and together we'll sing / just try your best / that's all we can ask / to bring world peace / and harmony
★ ★ ★ ★	Gotta Work Amerie	A lot like her other song but damn I love those horns and drums
	Family Reunion (Live/1999) blink-182	Goofy profane celebration of "The 7 Words You Can't Say on Television"
	I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink (Re-Recorded) Merle Haggard	Cracked says to give country a chance
	Kryptonite 3 Doors Down	Cracked also talks about the reign of the razor scooter. I feel like I should know this song more than I do.
	Please Don't Go KC and the Sunshine Band	So, I loved the clubby Double You version of this song when I heard it in Portugal, and amazingly was able to find it at Newbury Comics by talking to the clerk. Had no idea it was a cover. This version is slower but good.
	Got to Get You Off My Mind Solomon Burke	Classic R+B referenced in "High Fidelity" when he's talking about the rules of the mixtape (he thought it might be too much to lead off with for a gal he was crushing on so he buried it on side two)
★ ★ ★ ★	Shutdown Skepta	I do dig english hip hop - used to parody the UK government in this twitter video
	June Gizelle Smith	Throwback R+B they play at the bar at Simon Pearce in Woodstock VT.
★ ★ ★ ★	Don't You Want Me (feat. The Weather Station) Bahamas	Amazing slow cover... Sometimes you just don't realize how dark a and menacing song is until you slow it down...

---

Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve - great points on what an impossible job it is.

	Moribiyassa Kaba Blon	Some great percussion in this one from "Music from Saharan Cellphones" - music that had been passed around from phone to phone. via this tumblr post
	Forever Mumford & Sons	Mellow indie. Via Ted Lasso.
	Ben Franklin's Song The Decemberists	Kind of cool stompy indie about Ben Franlkin. Final song I'll grab from Hamilton Mixtape. For once, it IS the Decemberist, not just a group that sounds like the Decemberists.
★ ★ ★ ★	Smells Like Teen Spirit Too Many Zooz	Awesome small horn and drum cover. (Found just kicking around youtube I guess)
	GOGO霊幻! - モブサイコ Mob Psycho OST	High energy music with a middle eastern vibe. via this tumblr post with some great Japanese mascot dancing.
	Jolene Lil Nas X	Straight ahead (well, not straight, so much) cover of Dolly Parton's classic from BBC One. via this tumblr post
	I Like It Like That Rebirth Brass Band	Good ol' NOLA stuff, if a bit too raunchy gross. Playing in background at Anna's dinner party
★ ★ ★ ★	I am not a woman, I'm a god Halsey	Intense Electronic Pop. She was playing on SNL.
	Bella Ciao Chumbawamba	Straight forward cover of the leftist classic. (Just googling around what other songs they did besides tubthumper)
	yankee and the brave (ep. 4) Run The Jewels	Most of their hiphop songs are a bit same-y, but still a great sound - and an awesome Adult Swim Video. Heard it closing up a Ted Lasso episode.
	My Humps (feat. Black Eyed Peas) [JBroadway Remix] JBroadway	Funky cover. My friend JZ is one of the few people who understands the percussion I like in music...
	Father and Farther Jim Boyd & Sherman Alexie	Thoughtful kinda country tune, "Sometimes Father, You and I, are like a 3-legged horse that can't get across the finish line..." From the Native American produce film "Smoke Signals"
★ ★ ★ ★	Tainted Love Hannah Peel	Amazing "music box" cover of the new wave classic. Playing on an generally unwatched TV at Miller's pumpkin carving party.
	Conga Miami Sound Machine	Amazing crossover hit of the 80s. this Cracked article mentioned an easteregg in the game Far Cry 6 about this song, and I got to thinking about it in general.
	Pity The Downtrodden Landlord Bob Hill	Folksy sardonic protest song. A woman sang a verse of this at a BABAM protest for the tenants of the Forbes building.
	Brotherly Love Olive Oyl (Mae Questel)	From this old Popeye cartoon "'Cause what we need is brotherly love..." from this old b+w cartoon I remembered from my childhood was stuck in my head. (Heh.... I think we just had a black and white TV back then, so maybe I didn't realize it was a black and white cartoon...)
★ ★ ★ ★	Can’t Help Falling In Love (Live At Daytrotter) Ingrid Michaelson	very How To Make A Blockbuster Movie Trailer vibe to this (i.e. haunting unexpected female cover a pop song.) - love the out of tune piano of it though. (things I was just googling around after having had some other songs by this artist)

---

---

Via the wikipedia page on the Incoherents art movement.

---

An article on tough truths on leadership reminded me of something I heard on a podcast but forgot to remember the attribution: basically it's that every leader should ask people reporting to them "what is some bad news that I don't want to hear?"

I love the meta-reversal of that. It mirrors an excellent principle I've always tried to apply for myself - when I realize I'm hiding something from myself, semi-deliberately distracting myself away from a threat, that tells the other part of my brain "oh, beware, this thing must really be bad!"

Now this idea doesn't work all the time and in all situations or for all people. If you aren't able to keep the context that hardly any bad news is the final word (or embrace the existential bleakness "well someday the sun expands to engulf the Earth and then its the heat death of the universe anyway, so cheer up for now, kid") then diversion can be a good strategy. But I think it's good to cultivate leaning into bad stuff.

---

My 5G Coverage was getting a little spotty so I scheduled my Pfizer booster shot for today. Vote.

---

"Portrait of My Anxiety" by Margaret Curtis Poem I wrote in high school or college, then thought lost, then found 2 years ago, then forgotten that it had been unearthed:

A rock sat in the woods, thinking,
for many years, of many things.
Realized God and His plan
How to perfect life for plant and man
but it was a rock, and rocks can't speak
so it had to keep it to itself

I'm fascinated by it as an early instance of a thought I later had, how the interior lives and origins of things matter so much less than their surface interactions... I don't know if it will be effective - honestly I can't say that any state slogan would inspire me to go visit if I wasn't already inclined - but Nebraska's new slogan "Nebraska: Honestly, It's Not for Everyone" is brilliant. Decent month for music, a lot of HONK!fest and tunes from "Baby Driver"... 4 and 5 star stuff in red, listed in descending order of "you gotta hear this"

• Chase Me (feat. Run The Jewels & Big Boi) (Danger Mouse) One of 5 songs I got from "Baby Driver" - the video they made is kind of a "best of" of the movie, actually, with a lot of car-fu
• Tubas In the Moonlight (The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band) Slightly marred with a gratuitous racist word in the prelude (Dave Gannett's cover deftly removes it, so if I start performing this song I could just use that version) -
• Los Ageless (St. Vincent) "How can anybody have you / How can anybody have you and lose you / How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their minds too"
• Blues For Ben (Pink Puffers) - this link isn't the version I grabbed and put at five stars, but overall I feel like this how I'd love some of my baselines-parlayed-into-HONK songs to sound.
• Know How (Young MC) Baby Driver again - oldish school hip hop I missed- really great flow and samples. Is Young MC Old MC by now?
• Easy (Sky Ferreira) Another from "Baby Driver", sensual cover, love the line "easy like Sunday Morning"
• Ain't No Grave (Dead Music Capital Band) I heard these Zombie players at a HONK!festival after party do this Johnny Cash cover, big and brassy. Also I love the off-center spider web tuba design.
• The Hearse Song (Harley Poe) Didn't quite get around to making up a version of "The Worms Crawl In" for JP Honk Halloween, but maybe next year?
• Hearse (Ani DiFranco) Found this looking for "The Hearse Song". Classically Ani.
• Cast Your Fate to the Wind (Vince Guaraldi Trio) - You can hear "Linus and Lucy"'s roots in this. Love the title.
• Watermelon Man (Mongo Santamaria) - JP Honk plays this song - this version is a B-side of "Cast Your Fate"
• The Gambler (Kenny Rogers) Would love to make a Honk arrangement of this old chestnut
• Holy Calamity (Handsome Boy Modeling School) - More "Baby Driver" mostly I just adore the "HOLY CALAMITY SCREAM INSANITY ALL YOU EVER'S GONNA BE ANOTHER GREAT FAN OF ME" opening
• Smokey Joe's La La (Googie Rene) Final "Baby Driver" bit, it swings.
• A Secret Course - Super Mario Sunshine (Koji Kondo) A Cappella cover I remember from the GameCube game.
• Come from the Heart (Guy Clark) To quote Dogbert, "Dance like it hurts. Love like you need money. Work when people are watching".
• Put Your Right Foot Forward (The Original Pinettes Brass Band) More Honk-ish goodness
• One for My Baby (And One More for the Road) (Frank Sinatra) I do have a soft spot for Sinatra's melancholy stuff.
• I Won't Back Down (Live) (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers) RIP
• Blending Soul (Soul Blenders) I do have a thing for Blenders. Nice R+B.

All The Dumb Sh!t Trump Has Done As Nominee In One Mega-List. Cracked does this so well. All Trump has had to do is not behave like a toddler for the weeks after the election, and one set of FBI assholery puts him in spitting distance. What a country.

---

The one thing most Americans can agree on is that a large portion of the population seems to be trying to destroy the country. We just can't agree on which portion it is.

Whoa, work started stocking Cherry Zero Coke.

It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.

---

I want to take another look at the ocean, behold the vastness of tears from half a lifetime
I want to climb another mountain, try to call back the soul that I've lost
I want to touch the sky, feel that blueness so light
But I can't do any of this, so I'm leaving this world
Everyone who's heard of me
Shouldn't be surprised at my leaving
Even less should you sigh or grieve
I was fine when I came, and fine when I left.

Xu Lizhi was a poet and worker at Foxconn, this poem was written on the day he took his own life. More poems here. I really love that final line, which reminds me of Kozan Ichikyo "Two simple happenings" line.

---

Also, reading some of his biography on that page told me about facets of the rural/urban divide, and the appeal the city holds for some people from the country.

---

Aww, RIP Tom Magliozzi Not sure if he was Click or Clack, per se, but still, he and his laugh will be missed. Heh.. a friend of mine is taking a beginner's programming class in Processing. She wanted to make a "spotlight" effect where everything that the player's flashlight wasn't on was hidden in the dark. She knew in Flash it would be easy, just use a mask. There is no "draw everything but a circle" function in Processing, and masks are possible but difficult in it, and so last night I could only come up with lame half-solutions but this morning I GOT IT: an empty, giant circle drawn with an almost as giant heavy black border... the border effectively blocks out everything except what the spotlight is pointing at.

Sometimes you gotta think outside the box. Or, think inside the super-heavy bordered circle.

---

from Atari Force #2:
Single on Facebook, it must be official.

---

There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere. For example, musical sounds are always closer to pure sound than to noise. The equivalence between octaves and the privileged role of particular intervals like fifths and fourths are consequences of the organization of the cortex. To exaggerate a little, what you get from musical sounds are super-vowels (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure consonants (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound experience from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way.

(he goes on to say we do the same thing with colors, filling our environments with pure and "unnatural" saturated colors.)

---

remember there is a totally scary skeleton inside you right now

---

Just an FYI: The number of unlikely things that can happen is so large, you can be assured that unlikely things are likely.

---

I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.

--via 22 words (from toothpaste for dinner)

---

The Supreme Court is full of ignorant, agenda driven intellectual cowards.

---

Haha, the two topics of my louse 32 Klout score? "Tablet" and "Peggle". Awesome!

---

I believe everyone should play Peggle on the Tablet device of their choice, such as an iPad! (Better than Angry Birds, for my money)
--Space Quest was an old adventure game series-- sometimes the game stored the art in "Vector" format, with parts drawn in what might well be the artist's original sequence (minus any "Undo"s of course>) Neat to see, and informative for people who are still into making pixel art. A job or two ago I did some consulting at the same company as Sam Kent. (He introduced me to the joy of running one of those "Blue Screen of Death" screensavers, and the momentary start it gives to the unwary-- "FUNNY EVERY TIME" he assured me and I kind of believe it!)

I used to follow his LiveJournal, but just now found out that he's kind of shifted hears, blog-wise, and now set himself to answer Eleven Questions A Day:

1. What was my weight/body fat percentage when I woke up?
2. What physical activity did I get?
3. How much credit card debt did I have when I woke up?
4. What did I do to relax?
5. When did I lose my temper?
6. How did I make someone else happy?
7. What mental activity did I get?
8. What did I do that was creative?
9. What did I do to get closer to God?
10. What am I supposed to do before tomorrow?
11. What was my favorite moment?

The blog's inaugural post explains the choice of questions, and what he hopes to get by posting those somewhat private things online.

I support this kind of ritualized blogging, and respect his goal-driven and self-improvement-oriented stance. He welcomes readers and commenters as likely to goad his sense of accountability.

---

Fun with Windows: 1.Go to coworker's machine. 2.Press ctrl-alt-downarrow 3.giggle uncontrollably (didn't know this 'til I did it on myself!)

---

"It only looks big 'cause it's way up there..."
"That's what SHE said!"
"...that wasn't a very good one."
"...that-- is also what she said."

---

http://www.slate.com/id/2234019/ - Grammar, Intellectual Classism, and the Google Suggest feature

---

Listening to non-Fiction Audiobooks forms a kind of meditation, having to stay focused and not let your mind wander...

---

The very word jaywalk is an interesting--and not historically neutral--one. Originally an insult against bumptious "jays" from the country who ineptly gamboled on city sidewalks, it was taken up by a coalition of pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, notes historian Peter D. Norton in his book Fighting Traffic.

Heh, "bumptious".

---

Hollywood Ruins Everything - how not to redo a movie poster So Obama spent $3-$4 million on that infomercial... to me that seems pretty cheap, able to create such a media event at the price of, say, 30-50 good urban annual salaries. (Not to mention, a tiny fraction of the bailouts we're all going to be a part of.) Which tells me, I have a very poor intuition about high finance. How does any company manage to employ anybody? I just can't grasp the scale involved -- even a figure as "humble" as the population of the USA -- 300 million and change -- is really beyond my ken. (Ever see that book with a thousand pages of a thousand dots, with certain milestone dots labeled, ala Guinness book of world records?)

---

Photos of the Moment

---

Politics of the Moment
Slate was writing about both campaigns lawyering up and mentioned the "Brooks Brother Riot... I hadn't heard much about these wacky out of town Republicans that effectively managed to shout out the Miami-Dade recount in 2000 which in turn gave rise to the SCotUS stopping all recounts. Scary how much our republic was changed by this pitch fork and torches style management! (Like Marge Simspon says: "I guess one person can make a difference. But most of the time, they probably shouldn't.")

---

Obama's infomercial was $3-$4million. Doesn't seem like all that much, like vs. real estate, and to get to talk to everyone nationwide...

---

Brazilian coworker mentioned that they'll say "he eats like an ostrich" to mean "he'll eat anything, indiscriminately". Interesting ref.

---

Also: Brazilians don't have iced coffee. I now work for Nokia, after my previous company was acquired.

They've had a few introductory events to get us use to both big company life in general, and the idiosyncrasies of Nokia in general. It's a Finnish company by its origin and its heart, though I suspect its tempered somewhat by being international.

One chestnut from yesterday is "the Finnish don't have a word for please". That sounded a bit like an urban legend, and this page of 'Please' in many languages has some possible counter-examples, but I don't know if they're widely used, or not a direct vocabulary map, or what.

Googling for that I found a fairly convincing article that the Finns do have over 40 words for Snow and then a piece by an Australian on how laconic the Finns tend to be.

---

Quote of the Moment

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?

Man, I was worried that was just me!

---

Sports Trashtalking of the Moment
At the risk of sounding like I'm looking for another Boston bandwagon to hop on - the Celtics finally show huge promise, but I don't think I'll ever really dig basketball or any constant movement sport like that, Hockey, Soccer etc - the following bit of trashtalking was on the TV at a bar last night. Looks like the show was quoting Washington Wizards'* Gilbert Arenas'** blog:

So anyway, since everybody is back on the Boston bandwagon it brought back old memories. So listen here. On November 2nd, we're going to go into that building, we're opening up Boston. Right now I'm telling the Boston fans: You guys are going to lose. It's not going to be a victory for Boston. You might as well just cheer for me, because Boston isn't winning in Boston for the season opener. I'm sorry.

Oddly enough, he did look pretty sorry on the floor. Celtics, 103. Bullets, 83. Next time, Arenas, try to pick a night when your team isn't setting an NBA record for failed three point shots (0 for 16) and you yourself aren't 5-for-20.

* man, they were so much cooler as the Washington Bullets -- Wikipedia cites David Letterman as saying if "Washington Bullets" sounded too violent, couldn't they just be "The Bullets"?

** what a confusing last name for an athlete!

I'm out this weekend. Joining my mom at the Salvation Army Officer's Christmas Shindig... I might've mentioned, offical Christmas events for Officers have to generally be done with before the Red Kettles go out... for many officers it becomes the busiest time of the year.

I've been tweaking kisrael.com's editing UI a bit, using iframe tags to embed my backlog of "of the Moment" material directly into the page. So I thought I'd clean out my textareas... especially the one that's meant to just be a "test" area so I can see how HTML looks without putting it on the front page.

Anyway, it was a total mess, and I'm not sure if everything here was even meant to be kisrael'd, some of it may have been for my future reference. But in the interest of giving myself a clean start, here goes...

• The English Version of Pravda suggests that some Russians are still thinking about the nuclear arms race.
• Geek Health Problems
• Unmaintanable Code Ahoy!
• Obscure and/or Japanese games I may never get around to trying out: Kururin Squash!, Cubivore, Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen 4 ("better than Smash Bros")
• Srange Ad Parody but beautiful music.
• screaming walkmen on ziplines. Odd.
• "I'd say the same thing. Sometimes it looked all right. Other times it didn't. I thought our backs made some plays on their own, made some guys miss, picked up some yards when there were people that maybe had a shot at them. At times we opened some holes. Other times, we didn't do as well. I think we're going to be saying that about pretty much every position, every unit out there on the field tonight. There were some good things. There were some other things that weren't so good.: --from an old Bill Belichick press conference--I think I was awed at how little he could say after a preseason game.
• Edward Leedskalnin, who built the mysterious Coral Castle as a tribute to his jilted love of Agnes Scuffs.
• Customers Suck.
• Crazy Weather Guy... but his site us currently hacked.
• Single words other cultures have but we need more words to describe. (They Have A Word For It was a good book on that.)

Novelty News of the Moment
I saw this on CNN before it got boingboing'd: Bush's pockets are darn near empty. Nothing but a handkerchief, 'cause he has underlings to take care of all that stuff. Now, I have no idea if that's pretty much par for the course for man in his role or not, but it highlights the difference between "them" and "us", much like when his father expressed wonderment at a supermarket scanner back in the early '90s. (Though that may have been greatly exagerated.)

---

Grassroots Action of the Moment
So I guess this guy sued Netflix because the "unlimited rentals" they advertise are actually capped in the fine print...so they have this bogus upgrade program, where everyone who was a member gets bumped up one simultaneous rental. But it seems like the bump (which people have to pay for after the first month if they forget to put it back) is mostly to help Netflix pay for the outrageous $2.5-frickin'-million the lawyers are getting from this. Two and a half million!

I guess if enough people opt-out, like 5%, the thing is cancelled, which is what NetflixSettlementSucks is trying to promote. I'd suggest eligible people opt-out, it seems like a deal that stinks like diseased whale carcass.

FoSO pointed out the non-automatic cancel would be pretty evil, but I think it's Netflix just disseminating the evil of the lawyers who set this up. Burn in hell, scumbags, you're what makes the system break down.

Feh.

I can't believe how segregated the nation is, red and blue wise.

And of course, having fairly close elections doesn't push a politician to be a centrist, like you'd hope. Hell no, it just makes them kiss the ass of the extreme edges of their political base.

Assuming this is a win for Bush...yeesh. I can't believe the Dems couldn't come up with a stronger candidate than Kerry...I've said that before, I think for shallow reasons Edwards would have been a better choice. You would think that a middling economy along with the Vietnam feel of Iraq would have made this a walk in the park.

And with stronger Republican control of House and Senate....jimminy frickin' crickets, having one party with the triple threat has never been great for our contry, whether it was Republican or Democrat.

The Republicans are a scary, weird alliance of fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. I'm more or less ok with the fiscal guys but the social ones scare the hell out of me.

---

Scariest News Quote of the Moment

More exit poll respondents -- about 22 percent -- called "moral values" the election's most important issue then cited the economy, terrorism or Iraq. Those expressing this sentiment backed the president overwhelmingly, 79 percent to Kerry's 18 percent. Bush did similarly well among the 19 percent who identified terrorism as their top issue.

Kerry won overwhelmingly among the 20 percent who pointed to the economy and jobs as the most important issue -- taking this group 80 percent to the president's 18 percent. The 15 percent who named the Iraq war as the race's top issue backed the senator by a 3-1 margin.

...moral issues...prolife as a litmus test comes to mind.

---

Article of the Moment
Slate piece by William Saletan Simple but Effective: Why you keep losing to this idiot. George W had a simple message. Kerry had a complex one. That's why George W won. Incidentally, he suggests Edwards would be a good choice for the Democrats to unite behind, just like Republicans got behind W in 1998.

Frankly, I think most of the Red States are full of anti-intellectual, gut-feeling shmucks. They vote on a few issues and on general karma, not on record. Unfortnately their gutfeeling doesn't extend to thinking "hmm...Iraq is a bad, bad idea".

Great weather for quagmire fans, however.

I've been navel-gazing lately, and I realized that one of my defining characteristics is "lack of big ambitions"--but figuring out the root of that, and what the implications are, has been a bit enlightening.

Spun one way, I think the "lack of ambition" comes from this tendency to not want to play when I think I'm unlikely to win (which isn't the same as its inverse) I don't even like setting goals unless I have a handle on what the risk factors are. This goes way back, come to think of it...I remember strongly objecting when my mom would suggest academic goals along the lines of "X number of A's, no more than Y B's". I'm much happier with an approach of putting in a good, honest effort and seeing where I end up. I have enough confidence in my abilities that I tend to assume I'll end up in a good position...and so far it seems to have worked out pretty well.

Another facet of this outlook, and I don't know if it's a cause or effect, is that I have an almost Zen-like (or maybe more properly "Taoist") materialistic acceptance of most situations I'm in. I sometimes attribute this to "moving around a lot when I was a kid", that I've learned to be content wherever I am...which isn't to say I can't judge my circumstances, or make adjustments and improvements, but I don't have aspirations to, say, a bigger house and a better car. I mean, I know I'd like to be wealthy, and achieve immortality through my work (or by not dying, like Woody Allen suggests,) but I think those are pretty long odds, and I don't want to get worked up worrying about them; I'd rather spend my time and energy and resources on the things I find important to me here and now: Mo, my websites, good books, programming, spending time with friends, playing games.

I dunno. Is everyone like that? How typical is this outlook?

On another, completely unrelated note: fractions. Lately I've been thinking how "1/2" doesn't sound like that much, exactly as much yes as no, but "2/3" sounds like a lot, a clear majority. But broken down into decimals, there's only a 16 or 17% difference between them, which sounds like practically nothing, statistical error almost. So something must be slightly broken in my intuition about fractions, or about decimals. Maybe 16.66666....% is more than I give it credit for. Maybe 2/3 isn't that much. I'm not sure.

---

Vietnam of the Moment

Number of U.S. troops who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last two years : 354
Number who died in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964 : 324

I remembered that little statistic this morning after reading a Salon piece on Oiling Up the Draft Machine (subscription or day pass required for the whole thing)--there aren't active draft plans yet, but they might be quietly gearing up so that it would be an easier thing to turn to if needed.

The funny thing is I've previously liked the idea of making young people do military service or volunteer work; though of course I formed that opinion in a different political environment, assuming it'd be more like Germany (where they have it but it would be political suicide to use it) and less like Russia (where they have, and used it, ala Afghanistan and Kashmir.) With these guys in office though...

---

Article of the Moment
Slate says Stop calling firefighters "heroes"--they're brave men with a dangerous job that helps our society...but it's a less dangerous job than many others (including pizza delivery) and the men (and women) aren't above emphasizing and getting perks from their heroic perception. (I know at WTC, there was some under-reported resentment at the treatment remains of fallen firefighters got, relative to other victims. And that's further complicated by the way a communication failure was responsible for a large number of the deaths.) Quote of the Moment

A lock of hair touches one's eyes in a plane with East Anglia under snow, and one is in love.

---

Link of the Moment
Yet another wacky patents article, this one from the UK Patent Office. "For every 100 applications lodged, I'd say that 10 are a bit whacky." Like this one here, a hat mounted rifle...with recoil that broke a poor tester's neck during early testing trials.

---

Link of the Moment
The November edition of the Blender of Love Digest is here. Guess I'm still getting more (boingboing related?) traffic here than the Blender's usual fairly high numbers. Image of the Moment

--from this thread at cellar.org's image of the day. MSNBC's caption: Balloon pilot Ian Ashpole sails through the sky near Chatteris, England, on Oct. 28. He broke his own world record for the highest flight using 600 toy balloons, rising to 11,000 feet before he cut himself loose and parachuted back down to earth

---

Backlog Piece of the Moment
Did you know I sing to my car? I do. It's kind of a spoken singsong and it goes
    Funky little car, gonna go real far.
    Gonna go real in my funky little car.
    Funky little car, gonna go real far.
    Gonna go real in my funky little car.
I tell myself that the car senses the good vibes and is going to give me many more miles of trouble-free driving because of this song. Maybe it was good I had driven Mo's car instead of mine to get eggs this morning, because I pulled right up next to my car's twin at the supermarket, and I worry that my car would be jealous. ("There can be only one (cute little springlike kermity car)!", that kind of thing.) ❮❮prevnext❯❯