Time for a Dead President

part of his HBO special...R rated for language so the audio is NSFW
http://www.jibjab.com/view/127339

Eat My Brains

Yahoo news reports today that a naturally occuring virus has been discovered that might hold the means of limiting the spread of fire ants. That's great news, especially given where we might go live in a couple of years.

The ants have no natural predators in North America, but quite a few in South America. Scientists are considering if they can import any of those natural predators to the North here...like maybe the phorid fly.

"...the small phorid fly seeks out fire ants and lays its eggs on them. The eggs hatch into tiny maggots that bore into the heads of their host and feed on its brains."

Umm, no...maybe not the phorid fly.

Riverbend

Riverbend, the young blogger from the heart of Iraq, is leaving her home. She and her family are trying to decide whether to go to Syria or Jordan (no passport needed).

So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees- the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare- stay and wait and try to survive.

She's long been blogging about the decline of her country, and if you've been following her posts you've probably shared a bit of the pain and frustration. I'm a bit amazed it took her family this long to decide to leave...most of the moderates left long ago I'd think.

New Frontiers

Yesterday, physicist Stephen Hawking rode the Zero Gravity Corp airplane and experienced weightlessness for about 3 minutes total by my calculations (25 seconds per 8 passes). For a while, he was free of this planet and from his physical chains. Said Hawking, "Many people have asked me why I am taking this flight. I am doing it for many reasons. First of all, I believe that life on Earth is at an ever increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space."

…and that thought has nagged me for years…what are our options? What if the collective “we” destroy this planet? What then?

Two days ago we heard that European scientists had discovered a potentially habitable planet 20.5 light years away in the constellation Libra.

Now this is only about 120,509,246,957,068 miles away. So let’s see, with conventional rocketry we’d need to achieve 36,500 miles per hour to escape the solar orbit. I believe the fastest we’ve been able to go so far is 40,000 mph with the Apollo capsule…but that’s a bit cramped for a trip that would then take you 474 years to complete. Oh, we’d need fuel too.

So maybe we should set our sights on terraforming Mars, instead.

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an astounding account of how we might actually transform Mars into a place where humans might live and prosper. Considered to be the finest living “hard” science fiction author, his Mars trilogy is a fascinating read.



Hard science fiction, by the by, is characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both.

The colonization of other planets is scientifically and economically feasible. Being an optimist, I like to think that some day our Earth-bound hatreds may subside enough to let us look beyond our National borders and see something grander to achieve.

And if that makes you sad, which it should not, you can always look at this.

1977

7PM...oldest daughter and I are eating dinner in front of the TV when the phone rings. We roll our eyes (another salesman, no doubt) and continue to eat, waiting on the answering machine to pick up. The machine clicks on, and some strange voice says, "This is Joe Turner from Twin Lakes High School. I'm just calling to see if you're going to be able to make it to our 30th class reunion in West Palm Beach...."

Daughter's eyes got big as she turns to me, and she says, "30 years?!" I can only sigh...she's graduating high school this year.

1977 was so long ago...an easy year to remember since our country had just celebrated its bicentennial. Twin Lakes was one of those schools caught up in desegregation. It was downtown, a rather shabby part of downtown at that, and they bussed a lot of us suburban kids from the hinterlands. It was an old facility, but it was a short drive away to a famous subway sandwich shop and the beach...yep, we all missed a few classes. We had "The Wall" out in front of school that was the gathering spot for breaks, lunch, and rendevouz points for skipping. Twin Lakes closed its doors about five years after we graduated, and I hear it now serves as some sort of storage facility. The folks planning the reunion are offering a "ghost tour".

I hope their reunion works, but from the looks of it most of the folks from 1977 are 'missing.' They have 20 confirmed deceased, which seems pretty hefty given our class size. The close friends I had haven't been found yet. After 30 years, I doubt I'll ever hear from most of them.

30 years ago.

Eagle and Falcon Cams

Last year, on one of our trips to the Shenandoahs, one of the lodges had a video terminal in the lobby that showed a pair of nesting falcons up on Stony Man. We were fascinated. We also hiked to the summit to see them ourselves.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across this cam at the Norfolk Botanical Garden of a nesting pair of eagles with three chicks. Donna is especially hooked now on eagle cam-ing. The website says that the nest is in a 90 foot loblolly pine, and that the home is between 600 and 800 pounds and about 8 feet in diameter.

Take a peek. The parents feed the chicks regularly with fish. Just watch for motion sickness as the cam sways in the wind :)

Billy Pilgrim's Final Departure for Tralfamadore

Sad news this morning. Kurt Vonnegut has become "unstuck in time" and left us.

If you haven't read Slaughterhouse Five, I urge you to find a copy and do so now.

From Wikipedia:

In early 2006, while speaking at The Ohio State University, which he proclaimed would be the bookends of his college speaking career, as the first and last school he would ever speak at, Kurt Vonnegut said: "If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts."

RIP

Theology Exam

this one mysteriously cracks me up...over and over. Thanks to Mom for passing it along.


Do you really know your theology ?

Who was the 3rd man in history to walk on water?

The 1st one was Christ ...

The 2nd one was His disciple Peter ...

Then there was this guy, Miguel...

Patriotism

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

- Mark Twain

For in a Republic, who is “the country”? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant—merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

- Mark Twain

It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

- James Fenimore Cooper

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.

- Thomas Paine

Lots of rubbish coming from the White House now about the discussions going on in the Senate and House about Iraq…especially about setting a timeline for getting our folks home. Evidently, a couple of Republicans are siding with Democrats to insist on a timeline for getting out of Iraq. In my opinion, voting one's conscious instead of blindly following the party line is a sign of integrity.

I'm having serious issues with the tripe being spewed by our VP and fellow henchmen. According to them:
- criticism of the administration is unpatriotic.
- setting a timeline to bring back our Soldiers is unpatriotic.
- bickering over tapping American's phone calls with out following legal procedure (probable cause, anyone?) is unpatriotic

If the administration would propose something new, that would be refreshing. It appears a sign of the frustrating times that Congress finally realized there was no goal for going into Iraq other than getting Saddam, no plan to stabilize the country afterwards, and no fooking clue of the sectarian hatreds simmering just under Baathist bootheels. Our leaders were ignorant, they were impulsive, and they've rooked our country and Iraq's as well. It's time to end it. All our administration has delivered so far are empty promises of "we'll win this at some point if you stick to it" which wore thin last year.

Casualties:
3,245 American dead to date
23,417 American wounded (many maimed for life)
250? Coalition dead
60,000 to 600,000 Iraqi dead...nobody really knows the final

That's a damned high price to pay for ignorance, arrogance, whatever you want to call it...hubris? We could be there for a decade at this rate and they'll still be killing us and themselves.

What saddens me most is that Bush and Cheney took our national outrage at 9-11 and wasted it in Iraq. There were other ways to capitalize on our energies back then, better goals for our military. Maybe there still are.

Nation's Liberals Suffering from Outrage Fatigue

From my The Onion desktop calendar:



WASHINGTON, DC —

According to a study released Monday by the Hammond Political Research Group, many of the nation's liberals are suffering from a vastly diminished sense of outrage.

"With so many right-wing shams to choose from, it's simply too daunting for the average, left-leaning citizen to maintain a sense of anger," said Rachel Neas, the study's director. "By our estimation, roughly 70 percent of liberals are experiencing some degree of lethargy resulting from a glut of civil-liberties abuses, education funding cuts, and exorbitant military expenditures."

The House That Mike Built

In New Jersey, civil engineer Mike Strizki lives in a 3,500 SF house with his wife and all the extras like a hot tub and a big-screen TV.

Mike has also built the nation’s first solar-hydrogen house. “Mr. Strizki's monthly utility bill is zero – he's off the power grid – and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates.”

It took him 4 years to finish and cost $500,000, but strangely enough the NJ Board of Public Utilities gave him a grant of $250,000 for the project. Mike says that, now that it’s been proven to work, a little R&D and some innovative mass production of the parts can lower the cost to $50,000 per house.

This man deserves a Nobel Prize. His ideas, if they take hold, could slash our dependence on foreign oil, nuclear power plants, and in the end save our planet for a few more generations.

Do You Act – Or React?

JC's post of the Desiderata brought me back to another gem I've been holding on to for years. I annually talk about this with my daughters, and like to think the lesson of self-respect sank in at an early age.


Do You Act – Or React?

I walked with my friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsy politely. The newsy didn’t even acknowledge it.

“A sullen fellow, isn’t he?” I commented.

“Oh, he’s that way every night,” shrugged my friend.

“Then why did you continue to be so polite to him?”

“Why not?” inquired my friend. “Why should I let him decide how I’m going to act?”

As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was “act”. My friend acts toward people; most of us react toward them.

He has a sense of inner balance that is lacking in most of us. He knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility for incivility, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct.

When we are enjoined in the Bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction – which it is. But, it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health.

Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.

Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false because it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness. A serenity of spirit cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own actions and attitudes. To let another determine whether we be rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess.

- Author Unknown

Grant

My sister Christopher and her husband Nyles had their baby boy, Grant, in February. Welcome to the family :) All are doing well. Nyles, who's been accepted by a major passenger airlines for their pilot training program, was able to get back home for the weekend for the birth. We'll be visting in April and are looking forward to a bit of baby snuggling.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Beautiful

Pointless Waste of Time

Your life with a liberal arts degree in a nutshell.

Pointless Waste of Time is a cute website...think DocWu first pointed it out to me.

300

Woah...while watching Heroes on TV last night (on Tivo), I saw the trailer for this movie. My jaw dropped to my chest and I got an immediate adrenalin rush...Spartans! Persians! Spartans AND Persians fighting! Big war-elephants! Ugly guys that look like they came out of the game, Doom! Oh My God, this looks cool.

Live Concert Recordings on NPR

I’ve mentioned the variety of music available on NPR’s www.npr.org/programs/asc/ before, but wanted to do another plug for the live concerts recordings they have available. Most of the shows were recorded at D.C.’s “9:30” club. Some of the artists include The Decemberists, Neko Case, Arctic Monkeys, The New Pornographers, Death Cab for Cutie, David Gray, and my current favorite, Gomez.

Take a break from the radio, "See the World" and enjoy a concert.

Nontheists in America

Having finally found a "home" in secular humanism for my personal world view, last year I purchased an annual subscription to the monthly publication of the American Humanist Association. After a couple of issues though, I concluded the organization was rabidly anti-religion and hell-bent on making me that way, too. I was hoping for something they didn't provide -- maybe just a bit more company in my comfortable little philosophical sandbox.

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that, "Atheists challenge the religious right". Once you get past the challenging headline (atheist is such a dirty word in America!), it's pretty interesting reading. "Seven organizations of nontheists - including atheists, freethinkers, humanists, and agnostics - began the Secular Coalition for America (SCA), a lobby seeking to increase the visibility and respectability of nontheistic viewpoints in the United States." I like their central position: We affirm the secular form of government as a necessary condition for the interdependent rights of religious freedom and religious dissent.

As for company....
A 2006 survey by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life asked, "What is your religious preference?" and 11% responded, "No religion, not a believer, atheist, agnostic." While 56% responded as Protestant and 23% as Roman Catholics, other categories (Jewish, Mormon, Orthodox Greek or Russian, Islam/Muslim, and other religions) totaled 8%. That means that in the United States there are more atheists and agnostics than there are Jews, Presbyterians, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Roman and Greek Orthodox combined. I need a bigger sandbox.

Occasionally I have to remind myself, and others when they ask, of just what a secular humanist is. Wikipedia has a good summary of the tenets:

Secular humanism describes a world view with the following elements and principles:
Need to test beliefs - A conviction that dogmas, ideologies and traditions, whether religious, political or social, must be weighed and tested by each individual and not simply accepted on faith.
Reason, evidence, scientific method - Commitment to the use of critical reason, factual evidence, and scientific methods of inquiry, rather than faith and mysticism, in seeking solutions to human problems and answers to important human questions.
Fulfillment, growth, creativity - A primary concern with fulfillment, growth, and creativity for both the individual and humankind in general.
Search for truth - A constant search for objective truth, with the understanding that new knowledge and experience constantly alter our imperfect perception of it.
This life - A concern for this life and a commitment to making it meaningful through better understanding of ourselves, our history, our intellectual and artistic achievements, and the outlooks of those who differ from us.
Ethics - A search for viable individual, social and political principles of ethical conduct, judging them on their ability to enhance human well-being and individual responsibility.
Building a better world - A conviction that with reason, an open exchange of ideas, good will, and tolerance, progress can be made in building a better world for ourselves and our children.

So what do you think would happen if the majority of the U.S. population suddently became secular humanists? I think we'd create a better world. I think it's quite possibly the only path that can save our world.

Further "Dangerous Readings"

And finally...a blog that made me think of Andy again: "No matter how cynical you become, it's impossible to keep up"

Auld Lang Syne

According to Richard Lederer, hardly anyone knows that Robert Burns is the reason we all sing (or hum) Auld Lang Syne as we enter a new year. I suspect that few today would even recognize the name. I'm sure Andy is smirking at us all.

When Robert Burns died in 1796, he was but 37 years of age. He was born on January 25, 1759, in a clay cottage of two rooms at Alloway, near the southwestern coast of Scotland. His father was an unsuccessful farmer, and young Robert was assigned heavy work in the fields when he was only 11. The strain resulted in a progressive heart disease that was to prove fatal at the age of 37.

In 1786, Burns's life reached its low point. In despair over his poverty and the rejection by the woman he had hoped to marry, Burns resolved to emigrate from Scotland to Jamaica. He gathered together some of his poems, hoping to sell them for a sum sufficient to pay the expenses of his journey. The result was a small volume of poetry titled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

Burns bought his ticket to Jamaica from the 20 pounds he earned from the sale of his little book. The night before he was to sail he wrote "Farewell to Scotland," which he intended to be his last song composed on Scottish soil. But in the morning he changed his mind, led partly by some dim foreshadowing of the result of his literary adventure.

In the late 18th century, with its emphasis on elegance, style and refined manners, the rustic, simple lyrics of Burns seemed incongruous. But Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect took Scotland by storm and was universally praised by critics. Burns was dubbed The Peasant Poet and The Plowman Poet, and became instantly lionized as a natural singer and rustic philosopher.
Ultimately Burns's work established him as the Scottish national poet and the primary bridge between the rational satire of the 18th century and the exuberant romanticism of the 19th.

More than two centuries after his death, Robert Burns sings to us in another special way, for one of his lyrics is the first that many of us hear each year. On New Year's Eve, when the clock strikes midnight, the song that many bands around the world often play consists of verses written by Bobby Burns.

According to Wikipedia: Burns forwarded a copy of the Auld Lang Syne to the Scots Musical Museum with the remark, “The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man's singing, is enough to recommend any air.” One should probably take Burns' statement with a pinch of salt -- it is a fair supposition to attribute the poem as a whole to Burns himself.

Auld Lang Syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne ?

CHORUS
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
And surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin’ auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin’ auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
And gies a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

The 10 Most Dangerous Toys of All Time (or, How To Tell If Your Parents Really Love You)

When I was about 10 years old, I remember one absolutely fantastic Christmas. I got at least five toys that I made me a happy little tyke...albeit, a dangerous happy little tyke.

I got the gold and silver knights and their extensive array of jousting weaponry. I got a huge freaking battleship that came with missile batteries that could launch projectiles all the way across the living room! I got the Creepy Crawlers set, where I could make my own nasties by using hot molds. I had a blast, and I didn't lose any fingers, toes, or eyes. We're not counting that time I played chicken with David's knife, are we? I mean, that scar is almost gone now.

So, here's "The 10 Most Dangerous Toys of All Time". How many of these did you own? I had a couple, and even Sarah and Holly had a collection of Sky Dancers (I'm sure we still have them somewhere in the basement bins). I 'm pretty sure I had one of those nifty "crotch rockets" too, but I had more fun with my smaller version of the Johnny Reb cannon...man 'o man was that cool. I still can't believe I never got one of those Atomic Energy Labs though...I mean, what self-respecting boy in the '60s wouldn't have killed to get his own supply of isotope U-238?

P.S. A couple years later I finally talked Mom into letting me have a Winchester BB gun, but only after 3 years of promising that I wouldn't shoot my eye out. When I got one, I promptly aimed it at my friend and almost put his eye out instead.