2011 archive
Mad Cow 0
A cow makes a break for it in the UK:
(snip)
The cow rammed into vans and parked cars on the Victoria Embankment area, and police said it ran towards people.
Facebook Frolics, Crowning Glory Dept. 0
Feeling the heat:
(snip)
Insulting a monarch is a crime known as lese majeste, and Thailand’s laws against it are the most severe in the world. Even repeating the details of an alleged offense , such as on social media sites like Facebook , is illegal under the lese majeste law and the related Computer Crimes Act, “which says that spreading illegal content , either directly or indirectly , is a crime,” Anudith said.
Misdirection Plays 1
Brave New Films contrasts the defense war industry’s claims about their role in providing employment with economic facts.
Surprising result: It ain’t necessarily so.
Meeting Sgt. Pepper 0
Thom Hartmann discusses what being pepper-sprayed is like with 84-year old Dorli Rainey, who knows first hand.
Twits on Twitter, Freedom of Speech Applies to Teenagers Too Dept. 0
New rule for twits: Don’t get your Brownback up or you might end up in the doghouse.
Brownback’s office wasn’t too pleased with the tweet, and it eventually landed Sullivan in the principal’s office.
Sullivan was supposed to write a letter of apology — which she said would be insincere — but the school district has let her off the hook. Now Brownback is the one apologizing.
Follow the link for the statement, which Bob Cesca considers exceptional for its straightforwardness and lack of the mealy-mouthed “if anyone was offended” wording so common today.
QOTD 0
Admiral Rickover:
Aside:
QOTD was on break yesterday, recovering from guard duty over Thanksgiving.
Tempest in a Wing Bowl 0
Down in Florida, one of the speakers for a school career day was a Hooters waitress.
Now, I’m not a big fan of Hooters. I “dined” at one once; I was on a week-long business trip marooned in a suburban motel surrounded by malls and mall-type eateries; along about Thursday, Hooters was the only untried choice left and I figured I should see what the fuss was all about.
Lousy menu and no scotch at the bar.
Also, I find the idea of gawking at the waitresses quite repugnant; I find the stolen glimpse much more exciting than the counter display (also, the waitresses at that particular Hooters weren’t particularly gawkable).
Nevertheless, waiting tables is hard work and generally severely underpaid; I make it a practice never to belittle honest work.
Not so one of the mothers of a student at this high school. Daniel Ruth reports:
Really now, one could hardly equate serving chicken wings to Debbie Does Dallas.
The mother was concerned Morgan’s appearance would send a negative message to the kiddos that “you’re all bad kids, and this is all you’ll be in life.”
Morgan, who aspires to study psychology and graduate from college, did not appear in Hooters garb, opting for sweat pants and a sweater. She also stressed the importance of hard work, looking presentable on the job, learning to order from a menu, the proper way to tip and the various charitable efforts her employer contributes to the community.
Droning On 0
At the Guardian, Clive Stafford Smith demolishes the myth, promulgated by the U. S. military and the CIA, that there is anything “surgical” about remote control death from the sky. A snippet:
Read the whole thing, then decide whether the apt response is to weep or to scream.
Statistical Pretzel Making 0
Psychology Today considers how to lie with statistics, using one of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s campaign claims as its primary example (surprise, surprise). A nugget:
The other problem with Governor Perry’s fine sense of justice is that he was engaging in a statistical charade. It was a prime example of statistical cherry picking. If you look only at Federal income taxes paid you get a very different result than if you consider the total tax burden of our income earners. Counting payroll taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes for gasoline, and the like, you get a very different result.
Print the article out and keep it by your television for use while watching Fox.
Mitt the Flip, Acrobat 0
Mitt Romney is distinguised by the belief that he should be president because, well, he should be president because, well, he should be president because, well (click, whirrrr).
Video via Raw Story.
Exclusive Discovery 0
Audio tape of all Fox News pundits, past and future:
Image via Sampler, repository of the unusual; some images NSFW.
Facebook Frolics 0
My ex-local rag, the Wilmington News-Journal, makes having Facebook track your on-line behavior a feature not a bug of posting comments to newspaper stories.
The new system requires a Facebook account to participate in story comment threads.
Not that posting or reading comments at newspaper websites interests me. Something about that activity seems to attract the hate-full.
Slack Happy (Geek Alert) 1
I’ve known this day was coming for quite a while.
I finally got fed up with the direction in which Ubuntu is heading and replaced it with Slackware on my primary laptop. I started my Linux days with Slackware and it’s still my favorite distro.
I’ve put it off because the laptop has a Broadcom wireless chipset, and Broadcom can be a little tussle to set up; the firmware to use it must often be installed manually (in most cases, in my Linux world, hardware drivers are already in the kernel; having to install drivers separately is almost never necessary).
The machine came with Ubuntu and the wireless worked, so I’ve stuck with Ubuntu out of laziness.
Since I use the Fluxbox window manager, I was able mostly to ignore that Unity monstrosity Ubuntu is touting as the Next Big Thing (it’s not), but the recent update to Ubuntu v. 11.10 caused too many irritations.
The installation gave me a bad moment when it crashed halfway through the first CD, twice, at the same place. I took the CD out, found a fingerprint, wiped it clean, and then it went swimmingly.
So I’m a happy Slacker once more.
And a Hotel on Marvin Gardens . . . 1
. . . because the two and a half-dozen hotels on Atlantic and Pacific Avenues are not enough.
Virginia Beach, after raiding school board funds for previous budgets, now wants to change the funding formula for public schools.
The city has gradually reduced the division’s share of revenues in recent years. The schools originally received 53.1 percent of revenues when the formula was implemented in 1997 in an effort to ease annual budget disputes.
Mayor Will Sessoms said rigid funding formulas don’t work in tight economic times because of competition over money. Will it be killed in Virginia Beach?
Why? So they can give more money to developers, who need it far more than do the schools.
City taxpayers would initially pay $61.8 million of the $109.2 million project to build the 15-story, 361-room Hyatt Regency under an agreement between the city and its developer, according to sources briefed on the proposal. The city would own parts of the project including hotel meeting space and the pedestrian bridge that would link the hotel to the convention center.
The forces for building the hotel claim that, if it is built, conventions will automatically materialize through mystickal magickal alchemy.
The hotel currently across the street from the Center is not posh enough or doesn’t put enough mints on the pillow or doesn’t have big enough minibars or something.
I am skeptical of developer magic. I’ve seen it too often leave the rabbit in the hat while disappearing the money.
In this resort town, whose main attraction is a beach, the Convention Center is six long not-very-walkable blocks from the boardwalk and affords a marvelous view of a parking lot and of the beginning of an interstate highway.
I wasn’t here when the Convention Center was built, but I suspect it was located where it is because putting it nearer the beach would have forced some developer to sacrifice something and, in Virginia Beach, sacrifice is not what developers do.
Sacrifice is done for developers by school children and less-well-off neighborhoods, such as the one where the Convention Center is located, when City Council wishes.
QOTD 0
Salvador Dali:
Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.</blockquote>