"...he couldn't stop thinking about one day resuming his daily regimen of sexual intercourse with random women who look vaguely like his wife, only skankier."
---

The Onion

Quote of the day

"Mammograms are very uncomfortable, and of course, you don't want to shoot any more radiation into yourself than necessary, so women should have been excited by the news that you probably don't need one until you're fifty. Instead they were outraged. Since this was about spending other peoples' money, naturally we want the right to spend as much of it as possible, even if it's not very useful."
- Megan McArdle

Hagging in the Marriage Market

This post modeling how a small change in sex ratios (20:20 -> 19:20) can have large effects on what people might do to hook up is interesting, even though I'm pretty sure lifetime companion decisions aren't actually made that way.

Although I'm not sure the way we do it actually gives better results.

Webinar on Twitter on Vokle

...was given by Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist.

From my point of view it was a bit chaotic, but then I pretty much
only use Twitter to update my Facebook status - so maybe a good bit
was over my head.

I got a clue about "@", which I'd seen before but didn't understand.

Also a pointer to a couple of services, such as Buzzom, not that I'm
likely to use it.

Best advice: don't be boring. But I already knew that.

The deadliest mittens.....

A couple of years ago, somebody I didn't know walked up to me in a bar and asked "What can you tell me about the Soviet-Finnish war?"

An unusual greeting, and all I could think of on the spur of the moment was "I believe that is when the Finns invented the biathlon, except that they used Russians as the targets."

He grinned and explained that a girl he knew had said he could ask me a question on any topic he could think of and I'd come up with an answer (not true - he just got lucky).

Recently I saw an article explaining the success of one of these early biathlon practitioners, Simo Häyhä, who reportedly took down about 800 Soviets. I'm sure there was more to his success than just his mittens, but it is interesting to think they were a contributing factor.

An excerpt of an excerpt:

One of the reasons Häyhä was so successful, believe it or not, was because of his mitten ensemble. They consisted of three layers: the bottom layer was an incredibly finely knitted tight-fitting glove made of handspun yarn, finer than commercial woolen knits could be found at that time. The second layer was a fingerless mitt that stopped short of the base of his fingers, while covering his wrist and the first joint of his thumb. The outer layer was made of heavy, thick wool, in a technique unique to scandinavia called nålbinding, which was looped rather than knitted. This nålbinded mitten, in addition to being virtually impervious to cold, also had a split in it for his trigger finger, so he could fire his rifle without taking them off.

The underglove was fine enough that he could reload his rifle without taking THAT off, drastically reducing the amount of time that his hands had to be exposed to the cold. And if he did have to do maintenance on his rifle that required the underglove to come off, he could put the wrist-covering mitt back on; because that covered the pulse point in his wrist, it kept his blood warmer longer and kept feeling in his fingers.

I could use something like that in Rochester even when I'm not in a mood to kill people!

Quote of the day

“It’s hard to believe President Obama’s now been in office for a year. And you know, it’s incredible. He took something that was in terrible, terrible shape and he brought it back from the brink of disaster: The Republican Party."

Jay Leno, courtesy of the Volokh Conspiracy

Quote of the day - how to become a great poet

I wrote notes to women so as to have them. They began to show them around and soon people started calling it poetry. When it didn't work with women, I appealed to God.
- Leonard Cohen

Quote of the day

Natural selection, it seems, often smiles on strumpets.
Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Random Cultural Allusion of the Day

Actually, there IS a spoon.

Quote of the day

Lies were also categorised as to whether they were self-oriented or other-oriented with men telling more self-oriented lies than women. Overall, though, men and women told about the same number of lies, contrary to the popular conception that men are bigger liars than women.
- Feldman et al

All science aside, men are still more likely to lie about the size of their sexual organs.

Quote of the Day

But Lady Gaga is a more or less average-to-petite young woman, and she totally rocks the weird fashion. She makes me want to run around in a PVC bodysuit with a rooster hood, or no pants with giant hoof-heels, or whatever weird thing you can imagine. She is really inspiring.
- Prettier Than Napoleon

Chess versus poker

I stopped playing chess on a regular basis a long, long time ago.

When I DO play abstract strategy games, I usually play go.

Once upon a time, though, I was a serious player: a member of the United States Chess Federation (USCF), a player in tournaments, even a (losing) contender for the run-off to challenge for the championship of the US Virgin Islands.

Of the many world chess championships, many have been spectacular failures. There have been lunatics, apparatchiks, and monomaniacs (of course, being a monomaniac might be a prerequisite for being the world's best at almost ANYTHING). One that I've admired, though, has been Kasparov, who wrote this article about chess and computers:

erhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.

These might seem to be aspects of poker based entirely on human psychology and therefore invulnerable to computer incursion. A machine can trivially calculate the odds of every hand, but what to make of an opponent with poor odds making a large bet? And yet the computers are advancing here as well. Jonathan Schaeffer, the inventor of the checkers-solving program, has moved on to poker and his digital players are performing better and better against strong humans—with obvious implications for online gambling sites.

Perhaps the current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker is not a wholly negative one. It may not be too late for humans to relearn how to take risks in order to innovate and thereby maintain the advanced lifestyles we enjoy. And if it takes a poker-playing supercomputer to remind us that we can't enjoy the rewards without taking the risks, so be it.

HT, again, MR!

Most useless dating advice of the month

I rather enjoyed this article, but there was a glaring omission.

The article describes how men's dance moves were judged by women, and "women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to men with the highest levels of prenatal testosterone." So if you're a guy, and you want to glitter underneath that disco ball, just make sure you are exposed to plenty of testosterone while you are still in the womb.

In case you're wondering, yes, I had a high level of prenatal testosterone (PT). The way they determine this is to compare the length of your index finger to that of your ring finger. If your ring finger is longer, high level of PT. The bigger the disparity, the higher the PT.

Interestingly, and I have no idea what this means - if anything, the difference is greater on my right hand than my left: 1/2 a fingernail compared to 1/4 a fingernail.

Fun article, but couldn't they have given the poor male readers at least ONE dance move guaranteed to look good?

HT MR

Quote of the Day

And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I am asking several of my friends to do that. I had expected to become devout myself but it has not come.
- Hemingway, "A Farewell to Arms"

Quote of the day

"The way to interpret his intentions is not by his words but by his entrails."
- myself, in reference to a rather duplicitous player

Quote of the day

"As for the calls to treat the would-be bomber as an enemy combatant, torture him and toss him into Guantanamo, God knows he deserves it. But keep in mind that the crucial intelligence we received was from the boy's father. If that father had believed that the United States was a rogue superpower that would torture and abuse his child without any sense of decency, would he have turned him in? To keep this country safe, we need many more fathers, uncles, friends and colleagues to have enough trust in America that they, too, would turn in the terrorist next door."

-- Fareed Zakaria, via MR

Haiti

A bit late on this - but if you're wondering where to donate, Professor Cowen has advice.

Quote of the day

"A Shanghai hospital cultivated and reintroduced human brain tissue in 2002 after taking a sample from the end of a chopstick implanted in a patient's frontal lobe following a disagreement at a restaurant."

HT Marginal Revolution

Quote of the Day

You have a splendid rank. I don't want you to have any more rank. It might go to your head. Oh, darling, I'm awfully glad you're not conceited. I'd have married you even if you were conceited but it's very restful to have a husband who's not conceited.

A Farewell To Arms (Hemingway)

Quote of the day

"I want to tell you I used a calm voice, but I worry I used a psycho, calm-before-the-storm voice."
- Penelope Trunk

Really hitting where it hurts.....

Pretty much the same week we had the underwear bomber, the coffee machine at work failed. This turned out to be failure from ordinary wear and tear rather than sabotage by extremists, but it DID make me think...

The security around coffee machines is so much less intense than we see around airports, and America is so dependent on its caffeine of its productivity - wouldn't it make more sense for terrorists to strike at the coffee machines instead, leaving American workers bleary?

Also, it has the (inexplicable) advantage of not being seen as a capital crime!

Quote of the Day

There's no such thing as a "pretty good" alligator wrestler.

- Book title

A Christmas Carol on the Defense

Finally somebody thinks to defend poor Scrooge.

HT Volokh Conspiracy

Process counts....

Megan McArdle points out how much damage the effort of forcing a vote on health care did to the actual process of legislation. Her two biggest beefs are writing the bill to fit budget guidelines - this is done as thought trying to solve a puzzle game, with no consideration of what the bill will do to the actual budgets of the future. The other is an attempt to legislate what can be legislated - actually putting a clause into the bill that attempts to make it impossible (or at least difficult) to ever alter the bill in the future.

Looks like I'm NOT the only one!

Running that way.

Quote of the day

Paying lots of money to stop having sex with hot women seems an odd thing to do. From my experience he could take up playing Dungeons and Dragons and have the same result for a lot less money.

- Coyote

Alternative Medical Center

HT Coyote

Diversity in conservatism

This DOES sound like the make-up of one of those super-hero teams.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as does fighting super-villains.

Definition of the day - schadenhorny

OK, it hasn't made it into the dictionaries yet, but it is the lustfulness engendered by pondering other people's relationship problems.

Park rangers and bear hugs

I love this series, I've read from #1 to #1426 of the archived series, and am reading the dailies as they come.

Sadly, soon I'll have reached the middle, where all the archived ones have been read.
Fortunately, the dailies are still coming in.

Click on the comic and it will take you to the site and it will give you a chance to read them ALL:

Invictus

Normally, you'd find it hard to get me to go to a sports movie with a cattle prod. But with Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela (reportedly, Mandela had been quoted as saying that if somebody were to play him, and he could choose the actor, he'd pick Freeman) and Clint Eastwood directing, I didn't put up much of a fight.

Touching, great performances, not a boring moment. Worth seeing, even if you didn't think the original poem "..I am the captain of my soul..." was all that.

"Captain...the French are about to kick my ass!"

I'm not a lip reader myself, but this is as convincing as it is senseless.



Props to Language Log.

"I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you"

This achievement in the art of ranting was brought to my attention by Megan's blog.

Quote of the day

A good relationship is like fireworks: loud, explosive, and liable to maim you if you hold on too long.
-- Questionable Content

Keeping it simple

Probably not the equitable way to make your point....

Coyote sarcastically points out that the ShowYourVote website, which gives you a chance to show your support a "fair and effective" climate deal at the Copenhagen summit is a rather one-sided approach to voting - there is only one way you can vote.

I commented that this appears to me to be a project by an influential (since he posts on the official Google blog) individual at Google rather than a project BY Google.

It really should have been called "Show Your Support" rather than "Show Your Vote" to avoid the absurdity.

Internet Laws

A friend of mine just fell prey to....well, actually, I didn't remember the name of the Law she stumbled into, but I remembered there was one (the only one I could recall was the frequently cited Godwin's Law, which wasn't the one I wanted), so I took a deep breath, centered my chakras, assumed the appropriate stance, and activated my google-fu:

Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe

For those too lazy to click through (just taking the first quote from each, original gives you more background):

1. Godwin’s Law "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
2. Poe’s Law “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”
3. Rule 34 “If it exists, there is porn of it.”
4. Skitt’s Law "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself"
5. Scopie’s Law “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.”
6. Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law) “If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly.”
7. Pommer’s Law “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”
8. DeMyer's Laws (2nd) “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”
9. Cohen’s Law “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that... …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”
10. The Law of Exclamation "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."

Frank Lloyd Wright or Wrong....

Cute bit on architecture and arch parody.

And then you have the mavericks....

Like the ever-so-popular-with-the-press Sheriff Arpaio of Phoenix. Yes, you've heard about him, the tough sheriff that makes sure that jail is no country club, at least for Mexicans.

Makes an orderly bureaucracy sound almost tempting!

If you think *I* hate bureaucracy....

Penelope Trunk really takes it to the limit.

Well....as close as you can get to the limit without risking arrest too much, anyway.

For those who think bureaucracy is new....

...another extract from The Inheritance of Rome:

Being a tradesman in Constantinople around 900 was by no means a straightforward process. According to the Book of the Eparch (or the Prefect), a set of official regulations from this period, merchants, shopkeepers and many artisans had to be members of a guild (systma) to operate, and had to sell their wares in specific places, the gold- and silver-dealers in the Mese, the merchants of Arab silk in the Embole, the perfumers in the Milion beside Hagia Sophia, the pork butchers in the Tauros. Ambulant sellers were banned; they would be flogged, stripped of guild membership, and expelled from the city. Sellers of silk could not make up clothes as well; leather sellers could not be tanners. Some guilds, such as the merchants of Arab silk or the linen merchants, had to do their buying collectively, with the goods then distributed among guild members according to how much money they had put in, to keep down competitive buying. Sheep butchers had to go a long way into Anatolia to buy their sheep, to keep prices down; pork butchers, by contrast, had to buy pigs in the city, and were prohibited from going out to meet the vendors; so also were fishmongers, who had to buy on shore, not on the sea. The eparch, the city governor, had to be informed if silk merchants (divided into five separate guilds) sold to foreigners, who were prohibited from buying certain grades of silk. He determined all bread prices, by which bakers had to sell, and the price of wine the innkeepers sold; and he also determined the profits that many vendors made - grocers were allowed a 16 per cent profit, but bakers only 4 per cent (with another 16 per cent for the pay of their workmen), over and above the price they paid in the state grain warehouse.

Some people might think early medieval history is dry....

Well, some parts of it actually are, although The Inheritance of Rome manages to keep the dry parts fairly short. But some parts rival The National Enquirer (or whatever is the most lurid rag on the supermarket shelves these days) in dirt:

All these different trends converged in the great querelle over Lothar II's divorce from Theutberga, in 857-69. This ought to have been simple. Lothar had married Theutberga, from the prominent aristocratic family of the 'Bosonids', in 855 but soon turned against her and sought in 857 to return to his former partner Waldrada, with whom he had had a son, Hugh. Marriage law was tightening up in the ninth century, however; Charlemagne could put away a wife, but Lothar had to have reasons. He came up with the claim that Theutberga had had anal sex with her brother Hubert, had become pregnant as a result (impossibly, of course; his supporters invoked witchcraft), and had aborted the foetus: incest, sodomy and infanticide all at once. Theutberga proved her innocence in an ordeal in 858, but Lothar staged a show trial at a council in Aachen in 860, where she was forced to confess her guilt and retire to a monastery.

His view on Christian festivals:

But people still maintained the 'wrong' attitudes; they treated the new Christian feast-days in the same ways as they had treated the old pagan ones, as opportunities to get drunk and have a good time, as Augustine complained about a local martyrial feast-day. This way of understanding the Christian calendar, through public enjoyment rather than (as Augustine proposed) psalm-singing in church, was pagan in the eyes of most of our sources, but doubtless fully Christian in the eyes of celebrants; and this double vision would long remain.

A life fit for a king:

Cri­th Gablach, the major eighth-century tract on social status, states: 'There is, too, a weekly order in the duty of a king: Sunday for drinking ale . . . ; Monday for judgement, for the adjustment of tuatha; Tuesday for playing fidchell [a board game]; Wednesday for watching deer-hounds hunting; Thursday for sexual intercourse; Friday for horse-racing; Saturday for judging cases'

On diet:

vegetarianism itself, a standard ascetic trait, was a little suspect in Spain because Priscillianists refused meat, and the 561 council of Braga required vegetarian clerics at least to cook their greens in meat broth, to show their orthodoxy.

Maybe it's just as well Rome was replaced by 'barbarians' who know how to party:

Royal and aristocratic courts also had a different etiquette from those of the Roman world. The otium of the Roman civilian aristocracy, literary house-parties in well-upholstered rural villas, and the decorum of at least some imperial dinner parties (above, Chapter 3), was replaced by what sometimes seems a jollier culture. This was focused on eating large quantities of meat and getting drunk on wine, mead or beer, together with one's entourage, usually in a large, long hall.

Not quite ready to plunk down millions of dollars for this, but....

it's a good sign the state of the art in quantum computing is moving up fast; keep in mind we went from house-sized computers affordable only by major governments to desktops in only about thirty years - so I could very well be playing (indirectly) with ultracold beryllium islands in my lifetime (or more likely, some alternate technology that achieves the same effects).

Quote of the Day

Jibun no toile ga ichiban, demo okusan ha hoka no okusan ga ii
(My best man learned this one in Japanese class at the U of R. I'm sure the professor is safely retired now)

Quote of the day

It's easier to replace your rope than your partner.

Quote of the day

If the LHC had a sense of humor, they would announce that they are indeed going to try to create a man-made black hole and that the test is currently scheduled for December 21, 2012.

Coyote

Quote of the day

I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers.

"Sherlock Holmes"

Recommendation: I Am A Strange Loop

This book by Hofstadter (best known for Goedel, Escher, Bach) pretty much means I don't have to write it. If you are interested in the nature of the self and the meaning of consciousness, this book is for you. You might not agree with it, but you should be aware of that point of view.

Quote of the day

Every industry or occupation that has enough political power to utilize the state will seek to control entry - Stigler

The Leonard Cohen concert

My brother Joerg encouraged me to post a review of the concert from last weekend.

It seems a bit silly to review it - as long as Leonard Cohen was there, he could pretty much just sit on the stage and grunt, and it would still be one of the high points of my life.

He didn't just sit and grunt, though, his performance was jaunty. He skipped onto the stage and trotted his way right into "Dance Me To The End of Love". This is a song that my wife Jocelyn first heard on a Madeleine Peyroux album, without knowing that it was a Leonard Cohen song. I guess that is how most people hear their Leonard Cohen songs, at least those who haven't been privileged to see him in concert.

Considering he is 75 years old, the physical approach to his performance might be a bit ostentatious - there is just NO WAY he is in as good a shape as he wants us to believe. Nevertheless, you can only fake so much, and it is clear that it is not only women who have been exceptionally kind to his old age (for non-Cohen afficionados, that is a reference to his "Because of a few songs/Wherein I spoke of their mystery/Women have been exceptionally kind to my old age").

I suppose when you are Leonard Cohen, you can pretty much pick which musicians you want to tour with, and his picks were impressive. My friend Matt (who accompanied us with his wife Colleen) commented that there were a couple of instrumentalists on stage that he'd be willing to go to a separate concert just to hear them alone. Cohen gives them due credit, introducing each at least twice, with some idiosyncratic words of praise. Javier Mas appears to take precedence, but each one gets an opportunity for the spotlight, and makes good use of it. The angelic Webb sisters even presented us (as LC put it, "on voice, harp, and gymnastics!" with synchronized cartwheels.

Having seen another performance in Canada a few months ago, I can testify these are not "cookie cutter" presentations....this time there was a song ("Darkness") I had NEVER heard before (yes, turns out it was new). "Ain't no cure for love" was launched without the narrative lead-in I heard in Canada (and that is present on the album, with a catalog of drugs taken and a mention of the study of religions, "but the cheerfulness kept breaking through") - in fact, he didn't seem to be in a chatty mood that night, but he really gave the performance his all.

At our hotel, Jocelyn met a man who was also there for the concert and was following LC to see another concert in a few days. He mentioned that next spring LC planned to tour in France. Jocelyn, a recent convert to Cohen, would be willing to travel that far!

Prescription for ME?

http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=995

RIP Lévi-Strauss

I actually missed the news of the death of the father of anthropology at the age of 100, but there is a rather nice post in memoriam for him at Language Log:

Ultimately the work of Lévi-Strauss was as seminal as the work of Freud and Chomsky. It matters little whether any of these three is correct. In fact they are probably all wrong about their views on what is universal in the human psyche. But progress in the mind is not so much finding the truth as learning to ask useful questions that bring new rigor and satisfaction to research and researchers.

Quote of the day

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom. -Milton Friedman

My first comment spam!

Most bloggers consider this sort of thing an annoyance. OK, it really IS an annoyance of sorts. But since it is my first, it's kind of interesting.

Even if I HAVE no use for Viagra.

Vegan or Carnivore?

It is still funny.

HT AI

A job saved is....what?

It's no great secret that I'm not very impressed by most government programs, and the latest ones have been among the least impressive, struggling to save a dime by burning a dollar. You can always try to make it look good by fudging up some numbers, like here in the "jobs saved" category.

Obama seems to be following quite capably in Bush's footsteps.

For those interested in blood spatter....

There is an interesting tutorial by Slemko Forensic Consulting here. Don't ask.

Science fiction - so yesterday!

If you don't follow him regularly yet, click through and start

Quote of the day

", when preceded by itself in quotes, is unprovable.", when preceded by itself in quotes, is unprovable.

(A Quine)

Quote of the day - quoting myself

A girl should have a hot ass and a cool head.
- me, to a girl who was runnin a fever (no, I did not personally check the temperature of either end)

Before my time?

As long as I'm exhuming old writings, might as well put up a bit of prose...back from high school. You can see that well before Obama, I was concerned about energy independence (of course, since this was not long after the oil embargo, so was everybody else in the USA at the time).
---------------------------------------------------

Smelly feet

Smelly feet are one of the few resources in the United States that are as yet unexploited.

The essence of smelly feet should be collected, concentrated, and bottled. In the bottled state, the scent would be a formidable non-lethal self-defense - we would be as safe in our persons as the skunk is. Crime in our cities would be quickly extinguished. Naturally, the scent would have to be used judiciously, or the law-abiding citizens might flee into the country as well.

Because some of the gases released by our feet are flammable, if those gases can be captured, they might provide a new fuel source. Wouldn't it be worth exploring whether our foot odor could make us independent of the Arabs?

So harness foot odor for a better world!

---------------------------------------------------
On more mature reflection, the energy content of stinky feet is probably inadequate for our nation's needs. Also, the scent might not be "non-lethal", judging by my wife's after a long day at work in pantyhose.

Last Testament

That's really all the poems that I ever put on the web before. The others would probably be best forgotten, as far as art is concerned. But they might provide some insight into a young man's pouting and pretensions, so I'll inflict them on you anyway.

This next can be said to have been written before its time...mostly because "emo" really wasn't in style yet. Nevertheless, as maudlin as it is, I'm happy with the way it flows.

Last Testament

As the coffin slowly lowers
Do not weep to see me part --
The gentle hands of death assuage
The ruins of my heart.

You never wept to see me go
Those days I strived to win your hand;
And then, as now, I would not leave
Without some faint command.

At MY command I flee today
To beg the shadows' grace
My only music, light, or warmth
Are visions of your face:

Let my death now not torment you
Nor my passing draw your sighs
For the darkness that enfolds me
Frames the brilliance of your eyes.

That is my pride....

One of my favorite works isn't an original work at all - I translated a poem by Hermann Hesse from the German. My translation managed to preserve not only the meaning, but also the meter and the rhyme scheme. I haven't been able to do that with a German poem since!

THAT IS MY SORROW

That is my sorrow, that I learned to play
In all too many painted masques, to sway
But all too well the truth as seen
By others and myself. No gentle feeling
Stirs in me, no music reeling
Whose ways and ends are not routine.

I must call that my lament
Myself to know my innermost intent
Foreknowing every pulse's toll
That not a nightmare's admonition
No joy's nor grieving's precognition
Still manages to touch my soul.

Hermann Hesse (trans. J. Fiederer)

In

This one was Professor Ramsey's favorite. He had criticized one of my short stories as having too many adjectives. It irritated me - I had been trying for a Lovecraftian style, so this was no accident. I asked him, "Well, what parts of speech do you like?" He answered "I've always been rather fond of prepositions."

I wrote this for him...he loved it, and encouraged me to publish it, but I never did.

In

under before

 

from before

around before

to before

to:

on after

 

at before

to:

in after

through after

of after

 

over during, during, during, during

Been gone for a while! Time for some poems....

A couple of friends of mine have never seen any of my old poems, and I haven't put them in this blog yet (although I did on Myspace), so let's start with "Puzzle".

This was written back in college thinking about Lynn, a girl in my Physics class, who was a sophomore when I was a freshman. She worked as a "Programming Assistant", helping other students with their programming problems. If I hit an especially difficult snag, I would ask her...she'd just say that if it was difficult for me than she certainly couldn't help, she was there for less advanced students - but maybe I could help her with the crossword puzzle she was doing!

PUZZLE

always interrupted by those who come for help

your attention analysis and bottomless eyes

that drain their efforts of their errors

 

your concentration dissolves in the arch of your neck

your body edging forward to examine closer

your velvet blue jeans frame the motion of your thighs

and then your pencil beacons their mistakes

 

that crossword puzzle something I can do with you

seeking words the papers want also finding how I want

to meet your eyes again and chill your thigh with feather hand

and count your hair with my caresses introduce allseeing tongues

and feel the head accumulate between us join us

 

why do I not touch I know you will not curse

or start at me and backhand my devotion

what stops me but the threat of gentle explanation

syrup dipped rejection loving you are not enough

please understand I do not wish to hurt you

 

I find the words not that I need but satisfy

the vacant squares you fill with what I say

but my silence is unknown unheard unfilled

and more come needing your assistance

 

aside again I watch your lips glide from your teeth

I need your guidance so much more than they

but no right to demand it's not your job

 

Writing

Courtesy of (i.e.,l Hat Tip) Marginal Revolution, some rules for writing well.

The bit about rewriting is key for serious styling - any of my poetry (when I still wrote poetry) went through at least half a dozen rewrites, sometimes 2 or 3 times that.

For blogging, of course, my standards are a bit lower. Sorry, but there is a different between writing for the moment and writing for the (I should be so lucky) ages.

Stupid criminal tricks....

The oddest part about this story of the burglar who logged into his Facebook account from his victim's computer and left himself logged on is that there is some controversy about whether the victim violated the burglar's privacy by checking his own computer.

Customer Service....

I think even the girls who worked for ADT have not gotten this strange a call.

Anyway, strange calls from customers is a great concept for a blog.

Quote of the day

The difference between you and me is you drink tea and eat tofu. I drink whiskey and make people eat their teeth.
- Overheard

Acronyms Sometimes Suck

OK, there are plenty more....I guess the Wisconsin Tourism Federation, for example, decided to change their name.

HT the perfectly innocuous initialism MR.

Explaining the dating scene

At least that's the way I remember it....

(as always, click on the comic to go to the source)

The other side of the story....

Sometimes things just look SO BAD you figure there has to be another side.

Let's see - that cop who was caught on video beating up a special needs student for violating dress code, arrested for raping a woman at knife point, shooting his ex-wife's husband 24 times in front of their children....

Ah, yes, that shooting was ruled self-defense. I would have thought 12 times should have been enough, but I wasn't there.

Poor nurses....

Long hours, often strenuous work - and now, what really should be one of the PERQS of the job is apparently illegal.

Who knew? Does that mean those videos I used to watch are inaccurate somehow?

By the way, that dude had one unusual sense of timing!

That wild man Prawo Jazdy...

...or rather, the Garda (Irish police force) was honored with an Ig Noble award for literature for the speeding tickets they made out in that name.

Prawo Jazdy is Polish for "Driver's License", and lest we make too much fun of the cops, I would have done the same thing. We can't all know Polish. A picture of a Polish drivers license is available at my HT Language Log.

The origins of ass bombing....

Scott Adams is the only one so far with a theory that makes sense.

The details of the relevant incident are here.

Down the drain....

Looks like the investment we made as taxpayers in Chrysler is a bust.

Not that we had much choice in the matter, as long as we were voting Democrat or Republican, anyway - both sides seemed quite willing to have the end happen on the other guy's watch, and happy to spend our money in the process.

Really gives me sympathy for people who'd rather just start a country from scratch.

Quote of the day

"No murdering customers in the store. The back alley exists for a reason."
- Questionable Content

In the old days, girls would just ask if you had a light.....

Who the hell carries around a Samson phone charger?

Spooky smooches

I DO love this comic series, and since Halloween approaches...(click the image to get to the page that has the whole shebang)

Literature lovers.....

As the properly acephalous Language Logs points out, you expect coordinated phrases to COORDINATE.

Happiness is just an illusion?

Or is an illusion happiness?

This cool effect pointed out by the Bad Astronomer.

Arts and Farts

Well....another scholarly analysis of things rarely treated in a scholarly manner.

Quote of the day

Just when you get old enough to know how important it is to read those nutritional labels, your eyes can't read them anymore.
- Bob Lounsberry (maybe not the exact words, heard it on the radio)

Quote of the day

"Hot as a synonym for sexy is less common from people who've been on fire."
- Oglaf

Does anybody care about the Nobel Prize for Literature

Apparently, they do - as shown by the betting line pointed out by MR.

Apparently, Amos Oz is the top contender, currently. Maybe I should read something of his, just in case!

(Although many worthy authors are honored, others are completely ignored. 'There is the view that the Nobel literature prize often goes to someone whose political stance is found to be sympathetic at a given moment,' said Alan Jenkins, deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement. )

Quote of the day

It's comforting to imagine that violence and paranoia belong only to the far left and right, and that we can protect ourselves from their effects by quarantining the extremists and vigilantly expelling anyone who seems to be bringing their ideas into the mainstream. But the center has its own varieties of violence and paranoia. And it's far more dangerous than anyone on the fringe,even the armed fringe, will ever be.
- Jesse Walker, Reason magazine

Fearing That Hideous Strength

Chicago Boyz has David Foster analyzing an interesting response from C.S.Lewis to Haldane's criticism of his non-marxist ways.

It contains bits which I've often seen quoted:

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of
men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over
others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more
dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence
Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a
tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s
cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated;
and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly
repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of
power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely
because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience
and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since
Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to
Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers
with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the
inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents,
it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly
high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human
passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be
actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political
programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We
never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess
the future. To attach to a party programme -— whose highest real
claim is to reasonable prudence -— the sort of assent which we
should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of
intoxication.

The scientific approach: a classification system for girls

Apparently, there are supposed to be only three. One wonders whether the author had limited exposure or whether things are really that simple. None of the types actually seem suited for him.

Frying the Holy Grail

is too goofy NOT to link.

You might want to look up "British push bottles up the German rear" in the comments as well.

Everybody should do well...

...at the science quiz linked by the Bad Astronomer.

Of course I got them all right, none of the questions are obscure, although I did have some doubts about one of the questions. But it's interesting how many people miss quite a few, taking it will let you see the statistics.

Hopefully none of my Scrabble opponents read my blog....

Annals of Unfortunate Surnames

I was reading Shakespeare's "King John", and came across a rather strangely named character: Bigot. Immediately I wondered whether maybe bigotry was named after a Frenchman the way Chauvinism was!

Well, it's not. The French surname Bigot, while unfortunate, does not appear directly related to the term "bigot", which is thought to be related to either the Germanic "Bei Gott!" (by God) or "visigoth" (there is an attested case of "Bigoth" used for "Visigoth").

This could have been from The Onion....

....but it is from the Volokh Conspiracy, a respected law blog.

The headline says it all.

Founder of Jedi Religion Claims to be Victim of Religious Discrimination

(for those lacking all nerd cred, Jedi is the religion featured in Star Wars, now the fourth most common religion in the UK, if you believe their census - and they just might be taking the mickey)

A couple of links from MR

A couple of compelling links, offered without comment from MR today:

1) A New York Times op-ed listing the last words of people about to be executed.

A couple of samples:
Kick the tires and light the fire. I am going home.
I have come here today to die, not make speeches.
I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am.
I appreciate the hospitality that you guys have shown me and the respect, and the last meal was really good.

2) The dangers involved in killing all the pigs. (yes, they did this in Egypt in a brain-damaged effort to avoid swine flu)

Another In Memoriam, sadly belated....

For Alan Turing, who was doomed by the country he served for being gay. He finally has his apology.

In memoriam

McArdle said it all with a video.

Quote of the Day

“All of life’s problems can be solved with two things — duct tape and WD40. If it moves and it shouldn’t, you need duct tape. And if it doesn’t move and it should, you need WD40.”
-- Any man

Quote of the day

Another says, “And then they floated away on what I can only refer to as a cloud of bizarre midair sex.” I assume that, at this point, I was no longer talking about the ducks.
- From Woo in Review

Your Honour

Blast from the past ... I'd love to have a version of this for karaoke!

Would McCartney approve?

OK, the last copyright post was serious.

This one is just funny.