Octopodial Chrome

Well, the year 2005 is almost over. It’s had its ups and downs, and no doubt 2006 will as well. The years keep on turning and not that much changes. But one never knows: perhaps I’ll get a promotion & a raise, meet a nice girl, see my investments take off and achieve greatness. Also, find a cure for the common cold...

CNN Travel has a great article about bicycling across America. It takes about three months, apparently, and cost the author $4,500. Someday I would really like to do this. Even cycling across Colorado would be awfully cool.

A 16 year old boy from Florida ran off to Iraq for his Christmas vacation, in an attempt to try his hand at immersion journalism. Horribly foolish, and terribly irresponsible, but you know I rather envy him: it’s a great story to dine out on for the rest of his life. Who among us hasn’t wanted to enjoy a bit of an adventure? And what adult is willing to risk it? Heck, when I was 16 I would have thought this a capital idea.

The campaign which successfully fought to make marijuana legal in Denver is now turning its sights on Colorado, due to the fact that Denver police are still enforcing the state law. The campaigners make an excellent point: why not allow individual cities to make their own decisions? They have a very tough road to walk, and I am almost certain that this first attempt will fail, but bit by hard-won bit we will end Second Prohibition just as surely as we ended the first.

Not that I’m all that eager to smoke dope, myself. It’s the principal at stake which interest me. Although it would be interesting to see what character it would add to a nice Virginia/Latakia mixture...

A Pakistani wretch murdered his stepdaughter (25) and three daughters (8, 7 & 4) because the stepdaughter had slept with a boy; his excuse for killing the other three was that he didn’t wish them to do the same. The coward claims he wished he could do the same to the boy, but one will note that he slew a woman and children whilst they slept, rather than taking on a man in the light of day. It being Pakistan, one hopes that he’ll end up at the end of a rope in very short order.

What sort of backward mindset produces such acts? What sort of loathsome semi-culture can even in the slightest way encourage such a louse? I can understand being upset at one’s adult child for his way of life, and can easily see kicking him out of the house; I can even understand a father wanting to avenge himself on a man who has taken advantage of his daughter; but what perverse thoughts lead a man to so indecently destroy his own progeny?

Well, as I noted if there’s any justice in the world we won’t have to share our oxygen with this man for too much longer.

A researcher has found that families with daughters tend to be left wing, and families with sons tend to be right-wing. Even more interestingly, parents of daughters actually become more left-wing over time, and vice-versa for sons. People actually change their political preferences over time!

Somehow I realise that any snide comment I make will probably doom me to an eternity of bachelorhood—but I think any guy can make up his own...

Georgian soldiers came across an infant with spina bifida during a search, and decided to pitch in and help her & her family; they’re working to get her to Georgia, where a doctor has promised to perform the surgery forfree.

Whilst I was over at my folks’ house yesterday for Christmas dinner, my kid brother introduced me to Trespassers William, a truly superb band in the same vein as Splendid and The Sundays—in other words, a band which would have fit in great on a Buffy the Vampire Slayer soundtrack. And in fact, that’s exactly what they did. Say what you will about Buffy the show and it philosophical underpinnings (and there are valid criticisms of both), but it had some excellent music; indeed, some of the best in recent memory.

Anyway, Trespassers William are a great band, and you need to hear their stuff. Also, anyone whose name comes from Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (which is not to be confused with the horrid Disney version) can’t be all bad:-)

And many thanks to Stephen, for bringing them up.

Whilst researching purl, I came upon a list of beer drinks for winter-time, all but one of which are served hot. This is a tradition which needs to be revived. One should note that many of these drinks have reduced alcohol contents due to the heating, and are traditionally served in small cups…

Whilst reading an article about Dickens and the revitalisation of Christmas, I came across a reference to purl, which it calls a hot punch made of beer, ginger, sugar and gin. I immediately grabbed a bottle of Lakefront’s New Grist (incidentally, a sorghum beer brewed for those who avoid gluten—it’s rather sour), tossed it in a pot, added a tablespoon of white sugar & two cloves and shook some ground ginger over it. When it was hot but not quite yet boiling, I took it from the heat, poured in a large mug and tossed in a shot of gin.

I gotta say that those Victorians may have been on to something. There’s a tang which I’d like to avoid, but otherwise this could be the start of something grand. I think my next attempt will leave out the cloves, and possibly toss in some nutmeg.

In December 1914, just a few months into the Great War, British & German soldiers stopped firing and celebrated Christmas together. A relic of a better, nobler time.

Let us all celebrate the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; God who became Man that we might become like Him; Creator of all Who was born of a virgin. Today is a festival day second only to the feast of His Resurrection; it and the following days should be kept with joy. Decorate your homes; throw parties; ring bells; put on your Sunday best and tell the entire world the good news!

I just found a blog entry alleging that the Germans were willing in 1944 to trade one million Jews in return for 10,000 trucks along with coffee, tea, cocoa and soap. I’ve no idea if this is true or not, but if true then apparently the Allies refused the deal.

A Russian blog has an article on how to consume massive quantities of vodka and stay sober, as the Russians do. It boils down to preparation & pacing. On the preparation side, one eats some boiled potatoes and drinks raw eggs & olive oil (an American book of the ’30s recommends a regimen of olive oil for the same reason); this fills the stomach with pure carbohydrates and then coats it with oils, which moderate the absorption of alcohol.

On the pacing side, he recommends only drinking vodka, no beer, wine, water, juice or carbonation. This is because once one has gone into heavy drinking mode, and water will merely strip the protective oil lining in one’s stomach. He also makes a point of eating sour, salty & oily foods. These replenish the protective lining and give the body plenty of the substances it needs to deal with alcohol properly. The third component is constant intellectual conversation; if one is slow or morose then the alcohol clouds one’s mind. Finally, close the evening with some tea and cakes to cap off the stomach and feed a little bit of stimulants in.

Now, this doesn’t so much keep one from being legally drunk (one would still be over the legal limit for driving) as from actually drunk and sotted. All in all, a highly useful guide.

For beer drinking sessions, I recommend a similar regimen, with plenty of greasy, salty foods, e.g. a Reuben with a sideof deep-fried potatoes.

I just found a link to Courtney love Does the Math, from a speech the musician gave some time ago (a few years, IIRC). In it she points out the absurdity of the recording industry and how artists are underpaid while the industry makes a very great deal of money. She also points out the corruption of our political system: a congressional aide named Mitch Glazier fraudulently inserted an amendment into an unrelated act to redefine music as a work for hire—for this service he was made a lobbyist by the RIAA. I don’t care for Miss Love’s music nor her politics in general, but on this issue in particularshe is spot on.

Paul Graham writes in praise of procrastination. He points out that since one can’t so everything which needs to be done all at once, one must prioritise and do the high-priority tasks first; this means that one is not working on the low-priority tasks. He notes that an absent-minded professor who forgets to shave or iron his coat is working on a problem the solution to which he will be famous for; which is better: to shave this morning or to win undying fame?

An airline reservation agent illustrates the awesome ignorance of our fellow men.

Seeing some pictures taken by Buzz Andersen, I really discovered the Cult of Feuerganzebowle. I really want to do this some year.

My acquaintance John noted that Benedict XVI was seen wearing a mediæval papal hat. I gotta say that in many ways I’m liking the Catholics’ choice for pontiff: he’s apparently a traditionalist theologically, liturgically and in terms of haberdashery. We’ll see how he turns out, of course. But any man who resurrects mediæval fashions can’t be all bad!

Some days ago I wrote against mechanism, that folly which believes we are all but machines, carrying on like robots. There are several philosophies which deny mechanism, but the one I’m interested in today is called vitalism. The basic idea is that there is something which makes living matter different from dead; some vital force or energy, something additional which gives life.

Many believe that vitalism was dealt a death-blow by Wöhler’s synthesis of urea. The argument was that artificially-produced urea is chemically indistinguishable from the natural stuff, and therefor there’s no difference between the natural and the artificial. This is, quite obviously, just so much nonsense. Certainly, the chemically-produced stuff is chemically indistinguishable from the natural stuff, but isn’t that to be expected? A blind man may find an elephant indistinguishable from a tree when all he can perceive are its legs, after all.

What if there were more than the merely chemical? Were that the case (and I believe it is), then a substance which acts identically to another in the chemical sense may in fact act oddly in other senses. Something to consider.

Vitalism bears on medicine in particular. Is the business of a physician to fix what’s broken, or to restore a balance such that the body can (normally) heal itself? Does the concept of balance even compute? I’ll be writing more on this...

I’ve no idea if his ideas are any good, but Ovid’s books on love have been around for quite a long time, so they are probably not wholly incorrect. The man was a poet, after all—and we all know what sort of reputation poets have; on the other hand the very first book of his Art of Love goes on at length about the capture of the Sabine women, so perhaps his ideas are just a touch too old-fashioned…

A young man in high school was refused entrance to a school dance for wearing a kilt. He was wearing the kilt, white shirt and black tie—nothing rude or course, from the sound of it. And yet the insufferable twit who is principal there wouldn’t let him in.

Movie Puppet Theatre is a collection of hand-puppet parodies of well-known films. Quite amusing.

Have you ever read about David Hahn? As a teenager, he built a primitive nuclear reactor and ended up endangering up to 40,000 people. A very cool story about just how easy it is to do such things. And to think that I wasted my time writing encryption programs…

A scientist has engineered tobacco to produce an anthrax vaccine. The current vaccine has severe side effects; the tobacco-derived vaccine does not.

Spotted an article about Jorf, a programming language which came out at about the same time as Perl and Python, and had some neat ideas—unfortunately, nothing came of it.

I just finished watching the Gerard Depardieu version of Cyrano de Bergerac. What a film! To be able to write of love as he did would be a gift indeed. If you’ve not seen it yet, get thee to a rental store or Netflix and check it out.

I’d like to write today about what I believe is a highly erroneous philosophy, albeit one which is hugely popular nowadays: mechanism. What is mechanism? It’s the theory that all phenomena may be explained by physical causes. That is, a billiard ball moves as it dœs because of the force and angle with which it was struck, the gravitational pull of every other object in the universe, the interaction of the ball’s atoms and the felt’s and so on. That’s good enough so far as it gœs.

But mechanism gœs even further: it believes that life can be explained the same way. A plant exists as it dœs simply as the result of various physical processes which have been continuing since life first arose; a dog runs because of other processes; and a man lives, breathes, loves & believes due to the chemical interactions going on in his body.

In short, mechanism denies the existence of the soul; in its view, love, belief, hatred, envy and so forth are merely chemical phenomena. So baldly stated, one would hope that most folks would reject it, but many do not. Indeed, many embrace it; in their view men are merely machines. A criminal is not jailed because what he did is wrong, but because he is broken (thus the focus on fixing him, rather than on punishment).

An interesting—and recent—argument against mechanistic theory derives from Gödel’s proof in the early 20th century that there are statements which we know to be true, but which are mathematically unprovable. A machine can only prove what is mechanically (i.e. mathematically) provable, and therefor cannot prove these sentences. And yet we know they are true, and thus we cannot be machines.

What is the alternative to mechanism? Vitalism, about which I shall write further...

I recently purchased a mate (a gourd cup), a bombilla (metal filter-straw) and a supply of yerba mate. Yerba mate is a South American herb used to make a tea which is both stimulating & healthy, similar to but better than green tea. It’s all the rage in Argentina & Brazil, and is becoming popular here in the US. Me, I figure I can use another hobby which involves herbs and specialised hardware—after all, I can’t be smoking a (tobacco, of course) pipe all the time...

The Taliban killed a man for teaching girls. This is the sort of thing we’re fighting!

Despite the leftists’ claim that Katrina harmed blacks more than whites, the hurricane killed whites in disproportionate numbers. Interestingly, the numbers of men vs. women were proportionate. I wonder why it was that race was a factor. There’s some interesting research to do there. Perhaps more whites (being on average wealthier) are homeowners, and stayed with their homes, while blacks left rented properties to seek shelter elsewhere? That’s just a guess, though.

I saw a cool menu plan to feed a family of 4–6 for $45/week. It dœsn’t appear to be terribly healthy, but when money’s short health can wait.

I’d never heard of this, but back in ’94 a disgruntled Federal Express tried to kill the crew of an æroplane and crash it into the company’s headquarters. Fortunately for all concerned, the crew managed to subdue him, albeitat great personal cost.

A Frog managed to court his own mother online. I just want to say, as a devoted watcher of Brit-com, that I am laughing very, very, very smugly right now.

A motorcyclist named Matt had his ride's sparkplugs sawed off for use as crack pipes, rendering it immobile. Twice. In a row. And thus he has written this finely crafted rant against the folks who did this. Me, I think he should go for Options 2 & 3.

Cal Thomas has an interesting perspective on wanting to hear Merry Christmas; he asks why so many Christians feel a need to hear others acknowledge Christmas. I don’t fully agree with him, although there is some merit to his argument. I would like folks to quit pretending that 25 December is some generic festival day.

Last Thursday I took my final vacation day of 2005; this was my schedule: rise at about 1030; shower; shave; walk down to the local C.B. & Pott’s for a beer; walk over to the theatre to watch Pride & Prejudice; walk back to the Pott’s for some more beers; then walk on home. It was a nice day.

This rendition of Jane Austen’s classic is in some ways more faithful than others, but overall I wasn’t all that impressed. First, the good bit: Mr. Darcy is much more like he is portrayed by Austen herself: aloof and unlikable. The problem is that she dœsn’t really give us much reason for us to root for him in the book, and this film dœsn’t either. As for the rest of the cast, they turn in performances of varying quality. Donald Sutherland was essentially phoning it in, which is a pity as the character of Mr. Bennet is in some ways the most sympathetic of them all. Brenda Blethyn dœs an excellent overwrought job as Mrs. Bennet. Kelly Reilly is a non-entity as Miss Bingley—she should have studied Anna Chancellor in the ’95 BBC/A&E production. Rupert Friend is barely there as Mr. Wickham.

As for Miss Knightly (who plays the part of Miss Elizabeth Bennet, our heroine), I found her more annoying than anything else. For one thing, the director found it necessary for her to giggle at the most inapt times. I’m not certain why this was done, save perhaps to drive home the point that she’s younger than we would expect (in two other places, references to brides of 15 are made, so perhaps this was part of a scheme). Regardless, it’s a damned nuisance. Girlish laughter is wonderful in its place, but silly otherwise—and it’s definitely on the silly side in this instance. Regarding Miss Knightly herself, I don’t find her all that attractive: sure her figure has its appeal, and she has a lovely long neck, but there’s something about her face which is a real turn-off to me. She should be lovely, but somehow…isn’t. Now, Jennifer Ehle isn’t a great beauty herself (and is in fact less of one than Keira Knightly), but she is a fine actress with great talents, and her portrayal of Miss Bennet was excellent; Knightly hasn’t talent to fall back on. I will give her this much: she has poor teeth, and yet is widely accounted a looker. I’m very heartened by this: unlike so many actresses who starve themselves, who suffer surgery and otherwise mold themselves to fit some imagined ideal, Keira Knightly hasn’t bothered to get braces. There’s something quite laudable in that. Now if only she were an actress to boot...

As an aside, I’ve always wanted to think that I’m Mr. Darcy, but I rather fear that I’m actually Mr. Collins.

I have broken into the ranks of the top 10,000 traders on the Hollywood Stock Exchange—9,883 today, to be exact—with a net worth of H$88,362,504.50. I’m unsure when this happened, to tell the truth; it must have been some weeks. Regardless, I’m quite pleased with myself: I have bested 98.53% of the traders out there. Now comes the long hard slog of advancing further yet, until finally the coveted #1 spot is mine. Given that the current top-ranked player has had a 351,090% gain and I’ve only had a 4,242% gain, this should take me awhile…

At this year’s rate, that works out to about 1,500 years if my math is right. So I’ve some work ahead of me:-)

Today I returned to the IBM facility in Boulder for the first time in many months. I used to go up there at least once a month, often twice or thrice, and my old teams were based out of there, but it’s been a long time since either has been the case. This time I & a co-worker were up there to meet with our peers on the Distributed Ops side of the house (IBM have lately realised that perhaps it’s not the best idea to have employees working together who’ve never met; it leads to finger-pointing between teams, whereas a firm social foundation helps solve problems more quickly and builds professional respect—but that’s another blog entry).

The visit felt a lot like my homecoming; both I & my co-worker ran into many folks we’d worked with in the past, and walking around the campus was like walking around AC’s or one’s old neighbourhood: things had changed, whilst others remained the same, some people were still there and others had long gone.

It was a bittersweet visit, but I’m glad that I went.

Sodolak’s Original Country Inn has invented chicken fried bacon. So bad it sounds good...

Happynews.com is a website for good news only. Not my cup o’ tea, but if one’s an optimist perhaps one would find it congenial.

Most nations which contribute aid to foreign countries allow that aid to be used to purchase local goods & food; not so the United States, which mandate that it be used to purchase US goods & food. This of course puts money into the pockets of agribusiness, and harms the local economies of the areas being aided. President Bush tried to liberalise this, but the Congress voted it down. It’s a pity, as it would help our aid be more effective and its positive results longer-lasting.

Warning: the following post contains spoilers if one has not read The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe!

One thing which I think the filmmakers did excellently was in their handling of the White Witch. She, of course, represents Satan and sin, and is very attractive and friendly at first; there’re some obvious reasons for Edmund to be attracted to her. Just as is often the case with sin, he was given reasons not to fall in with her—and yet he chose to join her anyway. Of course, once he had cast his lot with her, he suddenly realised how wrong he has been: what had been attractive was revealed as ugly and rotten, but by then it was too late.

Or not quite yet too late, for of course it’s never too late to be extricated from a sinful life. And that’s exactly what Aslan d&œlig;s: rescues and redeems Edmund. Very well done, I thought.

OTOH, for some reason there were some beast-headed humanoids on the good side, which I think g&œlig;s against everything Lewis wrote. IIRC, the good creatures of Narnia are either beasts or fabulous creatures with beasts’ bodies and men’s heads (e.g. centaurs or satyrs), while the evil creatures are sometimes beasts and sometimes creatures with men’s bodies and beasts’ heads (e.g. minotaurs). But perhaps I misremember something…

I went to see The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe with my folks and youngest brother last night (one of the worst things about having a dispersed family is not being able to go to big premiers together). Our verdict? Very good. Not the most technically apt film ever (there’s actually one bit with obvious blue-screening…), but it dœs a very good job in most bits. The acting is actually pretty decent, unlike what most reviewers have reported. It’s just great to finally see the Narnian world on the big screen.

R. Preston McAfee has released a free Introduction to Economics. I’m not able to judge its quality, but it looks reasonably good.

Yesterday was Pearl Harbour Day; I don’t believe I saw mention of it in a single source. Today was the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder—and every TV I’ve seen had something about it. How wrong is that?

Peter Drucker sets forth the Five Deadly Business Sins. Something to keep in mind if one’s running one’s own firm.

This week I’m using up the last of my vacation time and am only working two days: today and Friday. You know, it’s been so nice that I’m seriously considering taking a 20% pay cut and working only four days. Heck, a 40% cut and I could only work three days a week, every week. That could be pretty damned nice, really. And I think I could just make it work...

An artist in the late 19-teens slowly went insane due to schizophrenia; a thought-provoking website chronicles this through his work. In each painting one can see the man slowly losing his grip on reality. Quite remarkable, really.

CNN reports that many megachurches will be closed on Christmas Day. Why? Because it’s a family day. No, Christmas is not about family; nor is it about giving; it’s about the birth of Jesus Christ, Son of God and God, our Lord and Savior. It’s not about us. Repeat, for all you megachurch-gœrs: it’s not about you! I may be one of the vainest, most pompous, most egotistical, most self-centred folks out there, but even I haven’t the sheer chutzpah to think that Christmas is about me!

HarperCollins have decided that young children are too delicate to be exposed to a picture of Clement Hurd, illustrator of the beloved children’s book Goodnight Moon, and thus the picture will be censored—digitally altered to remove the cig from Mr. Hurd’s fingers. A Web site, Goodnight Reality, has been created to oppose this revisionism. As it points out, Stalin altered photographs to remove inconvenient facts. Heck, when even the New York Times mocks you, maybe you should reconsider.

Gene Stover has written an amusing account with one of the dumbest mouth-breathers in recorded history; unfortunately the demi-ape in question was managing the project he was working on at the time. Incredible.

Every year since 1977 Diego & Susy Golberg (an Argentinian couple) have taken a picture of each member of their family. The result is an interesting time-lapse view of their family’s growth and ageing. It also provides an unique example of how differently men and women grow old.

Jeff Stout, one of my fellow parishioners, was named a Rhodes Scholar. He’s a sharp young man with a bright future in front of him: not only is he a Rhodes Scholar, but he’s also a subdeacon at St. Mark’s and will be married in January (Antiochian subdeacons are allowed to marry; I don’t know if Russians are or not, but suspect not; the Greeks don’t use subdeacons in this country). From my few conversations with him he ranks among the most intelligent men I’ve ever known. Congratulations to him!

Some years ago Idle Words compared two randomly-selected public school lunch menus, one French & one American. The difference is quite remarkable: each French lunch is structured, with an appetiser (generally a salad, but once a liver paté with a pickled gherkin), a main course, a vegetable, a cheese course and a dessert. The French children are being educated about eating, even while dining at school. Meanwhile, their American peers get a single course consisting of spare pig, chicken or beef parts (i.e. hot dogs, chicken fingers & burgers). The whole analysis is really quite interesting.

David Carkeet delivers some notes on how to survive freefall. Of course, it’s all a joke—if you follow its advice and die, don’t blame me...

Steve Pavlina wrote a quick little guide to getting better sleep and less, then wrote an addendum a short time later. Worth reading.

I saw this on Slashdot of all places!

But though our present account is of this nature we must give what help we can. First, then, let us consider this, that it is the nature of such things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case of strength and of health (for to gain light on things imperceptible we must use the evidence of sensible things); both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and dœs not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but gœs to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean.

—Aristotle, the Nicomachean Ethics.

In other words, everything in moderation.

On Friday I started playing around with MoinMoin Desktop Edition; it’s a personal wiki. The idea is that it can act like a free-form personal information manager. Playing around, it looks pretty neat; I’ll be using it over the next month or two and will see how it actually works out in practise.

Just discovered Cunnan, a wiki for mediævalists and re-enactors, with a pretty strong SCA focus. I’ve already done some work on mediæval recipes and cookbooks.

My old acquaintance and college roommate John Gipson writes about the absurdity of the term pre-owned; he's right, of course. It's a ludicrous phrase invented by some sad fellow stuck in a little cubicle somewhere. The proper word is, of course, used.

This morning Singapore executed a young Vietnamese with Australian citizenship was executed. His crime? He had carried nearly a pound of heroin into an airport there, while in transit to some other destination. Many across the world are outraged, but for exactly the wrong reasons.

Indeed, most opposition has been based on a misguided hatred of capital punishment rather than a recognition that no legitimate crime was committed. Was the hanging wrong because hanging is somehow barbaric? Hardly—a properly carried out hanging is a fairly humane procedure. Was it wrong because execution is wrong? Hardly—execution is a proper punishment for certain horrendous crimes (e.g. murder, rape, treason, perhaps kidnapping and possibly certain kinds of theft). No, the execution of Nguyen Tuong Van was wrong because there is no more wrong with carrying heroin than with carrying boxes of soap. That, not some theoretical folly regarding the death penalty, is the problem here. Many opponents of the hanging would have been satisfied with life in prison for a man who had done naught wrongat all.

It’s not the things you do that you regret, but the things you don’t do. I’ve done things I wish I’d never even thought of, but I can write them off as learning experiences, or as the acts of a young fool, but the things which I’ve never done I can never do. As an example, several years ago the Righteous Brothers came through town; my mother mentioned it to me, but I didn’t want to spend the $40 on a ticket. Less than a year later (a few months later, IIRC), one of the duo was dead and there will be no more Righteous Brothers concerts ever. $40 could have bought me an unrepeatable experience, and instead I’ve a lifetime of regret.

Likewise, when my brother Tom graduated from the Naval Academy all the midshipmen jumped from the 30 foot diving board in their parade uniforms (the tradition owes itself to the fact that the Navy has no parade uniforms and thus that the men’s parade uniforms are superfluous after graduation). He and his buddies tried to get me to go with him, but I resisted. There were officials trying to keep civilians off the board, and I wasn’t exactly keen on the idea anyway—why, I’d have to walk all the way back to our rental home to change my clothes! Well, that was a mistake: my brother will never again graduate, and I’ll never be able to jump off the 30’ diving board with him.

Another example is pledging Tri-Gam. All of my friends in college were members of Gamma Gamma Gamma; I attended nearly every GTE (their Thursday party); I drank gallon upon gallon of their beer; and yet I never pledged. I dearly wish today that I could; indeed, I would give several thousand dollars in order to be one of their number. But I cannot: even if I gave the money and they called me one of their own I never would be one in truth.

A lesser instance was when several friends drove down to Shreveport to do some gambling (a 10 hour round trip IIRC). I forget now why I didn’t go—but I’ll never again have the chance to drive out to Shreveport with some buddies in college.

Then there was the girl who, in hindsight, was very interested in me—and I never even noticed. And I was interested in her! There’s an error to haunt me for the rest of my days, for even had things not culminated satisfactorily we would both have learnt a bit.

All this is part of why I went to Germany with my brother Stephen last week. Yeah, it may not be the wisest use of my money, but who’s to say that I’ll ever have the opportunity again? Maybe I’ll lose my job next year; maybe I’ll meet a wonderful girl and spend my fortune making her happy; maybe I’ll be hit by a truck and live out the rest of my life in a hospital bed. But this was a chance to go and spend time with one of my brothers (hopefully two, but that didn’t pan out, unfortunately). Had I not taken it, I’d have spent the rest of my life regretting the choice; even had I a rotten time (to the contrary, it was wonderful), I’d have merely regretted it for a year or two. The choice is easy.

The regret I feel for the many things I wish I’dnot done is nothing like that for the things I wish I had done. I have decades to repent what I’ve done, but there’s no second chance to do what I’ve not.

Anthony Bryant has created a beautiful set of SCA postage stamps. They are valid postage, albeit a touch expensive (almost thrice normal postage). If anyone wishes to send me an Outlands set, he’ll be my friend for life.

Johan Norberg writes about the good Nike has done in Vietnam. While it’s true that their wages and working conditions are poor by our standards, they are more than generous in Vietnam; indeed there are more seeking work at Nike than elsewhere, and local shoe factories are trying to learn lessons therefrom. Something you won’t here from anti-globalisation loons. Not that there aren’t some very good arguments against unwise globalisation, and not that there aren’t some excellent arguments in favour of what’s called fair trade (really a silly name, since any free trade is fair, else it wouldn’t be made).

Deroy Murdock tours to New Orleans after the floodwaters have receded and as the city very slowly returns to normal. I’m thinking that it might be nice to visit there in ’06, to see how it’s recovering and to contribute some of my tourist dollars.

Graham Hoyland will be climbing Mount Everest in replicas of 1924 mountaineering gear. It’s pretty cool: they have layers of silk, cotton and wool: the silk provides wind-proofing, and the silk and wool slide very easily against one another to facilitate movement. Their theory is that this clothing is in some ways better than modern clothing—particularly vis-a-vis weight.

Of course, I could have told ’em that: just look at a decent gentleman’s coat vs. a modern winter coat. The one is lightweight and warm; the other is heavy and alternates between too cold and too hot. Natural fibres rock, synthetics suck, period.

OTOH, I can’t say that I like anything which increases the demand for wool or silk. But perhaps increased demand could lead to increased supply due to entrepreneurial possibilities or something. What this world needs is wool at $1/yd.

The Amazing Still is a room-temperature distillation apparatus which produces ½–1 quart of 40–50% spirit per day. Pretty slick!

An inventor in Minnesota has invented coloured soap bubbles, the culmination of 11 years of work. The science behind it is very neat indeed.

Just saw a link to video of a Harrier hovering over a crowded beach—and then failing to hover anymore. Fortunately the pilot was unhurt and the plane crashed far enough from onlookers that no one was injured. Must have been quite exciting, though. Happened in August 2002; Google for Tony Cann to learn more…

My brother & I found German food very agreeable. It’s quite hearty and savoury, with a great emphasis on meat & potatoes—but rather more flavour than one might expect from those ingredients. E.g. there are boiled potatoes—called salzkartoffeln—which I believe must be boiled in broth; they are rather more delicious than just simple boiled potatoes. Or possibly it’s just the use of heavily salted water, as the name suggests. However they’re cooked, they are wonderful.

The sausages, of course, were quite tasty. Even the cheap hot-dog class wursts (such as the famous Berliner currywursts) were a cut above what one might expect. And the good ones were simply superb.

We also had the German versions of Thai, Spanish and Italian food, and were never disappointed therewith. In fact, the Thai and Italian meals were particularly memorable during our stay.

Then there was the Kaufhaus des Westens, an immense department store with two floors devoted to food & drink…

All in all, I can heartily recommend Berlin to anyone with an appetite.

Americans tend to think of Germany as the home of excellent beer; I’m sorry to report that I can’t concur. It’s good, no doubt, and far better than American beer, but it’s just not all that interesting. English beer is far superior: much more complex. German beers are a study in cleanliness of flavour, while I prefer something busier. Still, it was good to have and drink.

An interesting fact is that beer, wine & liquor can be bought nearly anywhere in Germany: bars; restaurants; grocery stores; juice stores; sandwich stalls—anywhere. Apparently they haven’t the licensing laws which we’ve inflicted upon ourselves. The drinking age is 16 for beer and 18 for liquor, but doesn’t really seem to be enforced; it appears that one can drink in a restaurant with a meal with one’s parents. One can even drink beer openly on the street: my brother and I shared a lunch of bread, cheese, sausage, juice and beer directly in front of a police station. The bars can stay open as late as they like, and yet nearly every one is closed by midnight or one. You see, despite their lax drinking laws (or perhaps because of them?) Germans just don’t seem to drink all that much. I don’t believe that I saw anyone drunk while in Germany, to tell the truth.

No doubt Berliners get drunk, but they seem to do it far less than Denverites.

My brother and I both noticed that the girls in Berlin are for the most part much prettier than those over here—more attractive even than Texas girls. They’re not quite as attractive as London girls, but aren’t nearly as stylish. Their features are finer than ours, more distinguished and rather more interesting. I think that gals over there are so good looking because the German gals are German and the English, English. Over here we’re all mutts (I more than many), and IMHO it hurts our looks.

There is now a blog value calculator which is somehow based on the value of the AOL-Weblogs, Inc. deal. Apparently Octopodial Chrome is worth $2,822.70. Given the number of hours I’ve put into it (1,205 articles, assuming 4 minutes per article), that works out to roughly $35/hr. Not too shabby!

Well, my previously reported Berlin trip is now officially over: after a long set of delayed flights my brother Stephen & I have returned to the good ol’ US of A. It was a wonderful trip, and I'll be certain to give a full accounting over the next several days. For now, I’m gonna hit the sack.

Allin Cottrell believes that word processors are stupid & inefficient. While those might not be the exact words I'd choose, they are quite true. For the vast majority of computerised document preparation, word processors are not the correct tool to use.

I just shelled out quite a few shekels in order to have my furnace repaired. Worth it, though, especially as it’s snowing tonight.

Golly, is ownership fun! Were I still in an apartment, it’d be the owner’s responsibility to fix such things (and thus I’d have had air condition this summer); instead, I get to put them off until the very last moment and pay for them with my own hard-earned cash. And in return for the additional headaches, I get a residence which I cannot leave on a month’s notice, but for which I must pay until I can sell it to another. Whoopee!

Most folks don't realise that mandatory direct election of senators is relatively recent. It used to be that each state could choose its senators however it wanted: some chose direct election and some appointed their senators. In fact, early on I believe that senators served almost like ambassadors: they had to vote as their states directed. I don't believe that governors ever regularly appointed senators, although I could be mistaken in that regard.

This is a system to which we ought to return. The populace already have a directly-elected body: the House of Representatives. Moreover, direct election of senators obscures the fact that ours is a federal republic, a union of states rather than a simple national government. Returning to the earlier system would reinforce that fact, and perhaps do some good in forestalling those who think that every law should be passed in Washington rather than in the state legislatures.

Jeffrey Carver has put up Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy, a nice guide to writing that most enjoyable form of fiction. Seen on jackdied.com.

While searching for information about rithmomachia, I discovered The Game Report, which has reviews of various unusual games & such. Naught about rithmomachia, but that’s just my luck.

My buddy Dean recently turned 30; he & his wife threw a great party to celebrate yesterday evening. They brought in a company to do a casino night: craps, roulette, blackjack & poker tables. It was a blast. I played roulette all evening to test out a system. With a large enough bankroll, one should be able to do well at roulette (that is, the odds of losing in any one night would be infinitesimal); the problem is that with that much money the winnings would be hardly worth it. Still, it’s a fun way to spend a thousand dollars!

Today is Armistice Day, popularly called Veterans’ Day, when we mark the sacrifice paid by those who have fought for this republic.

It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organiser, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.

Chaplain Dennis Edward O’Brian, USMC

Chaplain O’Brian is correct; although certainly these soldiers were sent forth by other men, and those men were encouraged to actions by others still, in the end freedom is often won not by persuasive words or mutual consent, but by forcing those who would withhold it to submit.

May God defend our soldiers in all their battles, and may those battles not be against His will.

Jewish Chaplain Carlos Huerta writes about the death of an Iraqi boy during Ramadan, the day before Yom Kippur. It’s a revealing account of the world of a military chaplain: a Jewish rabbi taught by a Moslem imam to pray Islamic prayers over a dying boy, and comforted by a Catholic priest.

I don’t know that I’m comfortable with the idea of saying the words of another faith’s prayers, though. I’m not certain, but I would be very surprised if the canons of the Church didn’t forbid such a thing. But could one pray with a dying man who will not convert, and then do one’s penance for such an action?

I suppose it comes down to the question of what other religion’s gods are: are they demons, or do they not exist? If they don’t exist, then it doesn’t do that much harm to pray to them—it’s just a bunch of empty words. But if they exist, and are demonic, then to pray to them is evil and to be avoided at all costs.

And of course the martyrs refused to pray to false gods and suffered death for their actions; it seems a much smaller thing to refuse to pray to a false god and be thought unkind by others. OTOH in the world of the martyrs their form of witness (and martyr means witness, after all) was effective in winning others to God; folks saw the Christians dying for their faith and were impressed. In our world such a form of witness would be more likely to drive others away; someone would likely see a Christian refusing to pray with a dying man (even if offering every other form of consolation and comfort) and be turned away from God thereby. In the modern world’s eyes, it’s more admirable to be nice than to be principled. But of course we cannot reject principle simply for convenience.

Perhaps one could prompt the dying man; that is, not pray with him, but merely read aloud the words for him to pray to himself. But even still the idea of helping a man to pray to demons is repugnant, and thus if false gods are demonic then even that action would be evil. But would that evil be worse than the evil of turning others from Christ?

The best thing is to discuss this with one’s spiritual father, and to do as he directs. A relatively ignorant layman such as I (well, I’m a reader and thus in one reckoning minor clergy, but you know what I mean…) doesn’t have the familiarity with all the relevant issues that a more learnéd clergyman has.

Regardless, it’s a moving article—and of course my own concerns are not those of a Jewish rabbi, who is the one involved in this case.

Now you too can construct your own mind control ray deflecting hat. Make one for each member of your family, just to be safe.

Today is the 230th birthday of the Marines; Mackubin Thomas Owens commemorates it in his own way.

Well, recently I’ve become embroiled in a family crisis of sorts. I’ll not name any names, but essentially an elderly couple (Couple A) to whom I’m somehow (won’t say how…) related have apparently become incapable of taking care of themselves. I was first contacted by a distant member of the family (Person B—unrelated by blood) whom I’ve never met, and who thought that my phone number was that of a nearer family member (Person C). I passed the information on to Person C, who consulted with another relative (Person D) took the steps which seemed appropriate at the time—and then continued on a trip out of the country.

Well, while C was out of the country, I was contacted by yet another party (Friend E), a longtime friend of Couple A and who also believed me to be C, with the bad news that A had been taken to a hospital, but that there was no immediate need for C to return, as they were doing well. I gave D a call, and sent C an email, with this information, and thought my part done.

Well, I just got another call from B, with bad news about A and a caution against a Person F. Of course, I have never met either B or F, and cannot judge between them. Mine is not to reason why; mine is but to pass on data. So I called D, who wanted me to try to get ahold of C and find out what course of action to pursue. This I did, dealing with obstreperous Third World porters and such before finally consulting with C, and then called D back with C’s thoughts. And then B called me back with more information. Which I also passed on.

Oh, and did I mention that C & D have been estranged from A for several years now, while B & E are quite fond of A?

What a bloody mess. And somehow I get stuck in the middle of it all, simply because some people got ahold of my number instead of Person C’s. Still, one hopes that things turn out well for Couple A, Persons C & D and Friend E. As for Persons B & F, they may both be dastards or both be heroes; only time will tell.

I did find that when talking with Persons C & D I sounded an awful lot like my old man does when he lays out options for another to consider. Kinda proud of myself, to tell the truth.

Today marks the 16th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, known as Freedom Day (which I’ll admit is a rather silly-sounding name). My entire childhood we all believed that the day would come when we & the Soviets would come to blows, and that the world would be destroyed—and then in a great rush their entire totalitarian edifice crumbled, Germany was reunited, Eastern Europe was freed and Russia cast off Communism. It was a heady time, and even though I was but a kid I knew something very important was going on, something which is probably the most momentous event in my lifetime.

As some of my friends & family know, I’ve recently (back in August, IIRC) started learning the guitar. It’s tough work, but the reward—hearing a song one knows by heart come out of one’s own instrument—is well worth it. Progress is unfortunately slower than I’d like. I’ve hit the first real plateau, and haven’t gotten any better in about a month. Not certain what I need to do—or can do—to resolve this issue.

While at the Denver Museum of Natural History this weekend we saw a very neat collection of gems & minerals. Most of the were retrieved from mines deep below the earth, and it occurred to me how wonderful it must be to be the first man—the first living creature—to set eyes on them. But I was also saddened, because apparently many of these beautiful crystals are ground up and used for industrial and medical purposes. Certainly, it’s important that industry progress, and I’d willingly sacrifice tons of pretty rock to save a single life—but it’s still sad that something which has been forming since the dawn of time should be so abruptly destroyed.

I highly recommend seeing the collection; it’s well worth the time.

On Sunday my friend Shaima & I took a stroll around Confluence Park. What should we find but an eddy in the Platte River which collects garbage? It’s truly disgusting: a pleasant, semi-natural scene spoilt by refuse.

Something should be done.

Girls smell nice; I first noticed this back in college, when I found that Baker Hall where I lived smelt mostly of urine and BO, whilst Clyce Hall (where I & my friends chased the gals resident there) smelt nice. Well, this was brought home to me once again this morning. After my friend had completed her ablutions, I performed my own---and when I entered I discovered that my bathroom smelt nicer than it ever has. It's really quite amazing how they do whatever it is they do. Perhaps they use nice soaps or something?

This complete set of hematite dice (4, 6, 8, 2x10, 12 & 20 sided specimens) is just too cool for words. The same vendor makes obsidian, rose quartz, jade, agate and other semi-precious stone dice, but I want hematite. And amethyst. And carnelian. And (synthetic) opal. And…

A nice side effect of having a friend visit is that it gives one the impetus to clean one’s place, and so my condo is finally rather nicely squared away. I’d really like to have more folks by, actually, so that I can show it off in a good light.

What I’d like to know is why it always takes two days to clean my place. It doesn’t matter if I spend a month cleaning ahead of time, but it’s always a disaster area until two days beforehand, when suddenly my cleaning starts to work, and I end up finishing with 4–6 hours to spare. It’s really quite remarkable.

An old friend of mine was in town this weekend and so we got to spend some time together, which was very nice. It’s funny: we don’t agree about a lot of things (the joke is that each thinks the other completely, horribly, awfully wrong about everything—save for the things we agree on), but nonetheless we’d a very pleasant day (yesterday evening & most of today).

Something I’ve realised with Shaima’s visit, and my own visit to see Phil & Jess in Texas (along with all the others I saw) is that friends—not acquaintances, but real friends—are one of the few key things in life. It’s not so much the frequency that one sees them, but that one sees them at all, that one has a few kindred spirits out there. C.S. Lewis wrote much more eloquently on φιλία than I ever could, and his words are worth reading.

One of the bad things about seeing one’s friends so rarely, though, is that it takes time to fall back into things, although as I’ve noted given a short amount of time it all works out. That’s definitely an issue which more time together rather than apart would help.

So if someone would just break the laws of the universe and invent a teleporter so that I might see my friends every week, no matter where on the globe they are, I’d be much obliged.

The Grey Kangaroo is a charcoal filter designed for alcohol; it is supposed to filter cheap vodka and make it taste like expensive stuff. Somehow I don’t really see it. All I can say is that things have changed since I was in school.

Someone actually produces Menger Sponges for sale. I desperately want one.

My folks left for a tour of Greece following St. Paul’s footsteps yesterday. I drove them to the æroport—from their office. Yes, the day my parents left for another continent they worked a half day! What sort of insanity is involved therein? What sort of man goes to work when he should be on vacation? My parents are really and truly bonkers.

Yes, you really can use a soda can & a chocolate bar to start a fire. The chocolate is an abrasive, which is used to polish the dimple in the bottom of the can; this polished dimple is a parabolic mirror, which focuses the sun’s rays and starts a fire. Sweeet!

A Baptist pastor was electrocuted whilst baptising when his microphone got wet. This raises two issues: first of all, why was he using a microphone in church; and secondly, why use a microphone in a baptism?

Somehow for nearly two millennia we Christians managed to worship our God without the use of microphones. It’s not difficult to get sound to carry; it merely requires some forethought by the architects.

And baptism is—or should be—something which requires no loud noise at all. I don’t require ever seeing my father bellow at a baptism loudly enough for the entire city block to hear him; why would this fellow see the need?

One does feel sorry for his widow and their children, but this was an eminently preventable accident. Rather surprising that a microphone carries enough voltage to kill, though; I’d have thought it would be fairly weak.

The late Douglas Adams once wrote on whisky:

I love whisky in every way. I love the way it looks in the bottle, that rich golden colour. I love the labels arranged on the shelf—the kilts and claymores and slighly out-of-focus sheep. I love the sense that it's a drink that—unlike, for instance, vodka from Warrington—is rich in the culture and history of the place where it is distilled. I love particularly the smoky, peaty aromas of the single malts. In fact the only thing I don't like about whisky is that if I take the merest sip of the stuff it sends a sharp pain from the back of my left eyeball down to the tip of my right elbow, and I begin to walk in a very special way, bumping into people and snarling at the furniture…

He wrote me once, when I had written him to congratulate him on the birth of his daughter, whom I remember was named something absurd like Polly Rocket Adams or somesuch. The man was an atheist, but a smart fellow otherwise. I do hope that when his heart gave out—at far too early an age—he had enough time to repent sufficiently. The thought of heaven without Adams is nearly unbearable.

From Tim Daneliuk on alt.smokers.pipes:

Blends That Never Were - Part III

My Own Jihad

A Blend of 72 Different Virginias. You'll Be in Heaven!

Baathist Blend

Syrian Latakia and Sand Combine for a Taste You Won't Live to Remember.

Chalk and Awe

An English Style Blend Made in America. Noteworthy for Its Casing of Cordite, Gunpowder, and Nitro-Toluene. (Primarily for Export)

Axioms of Evil

Dark Kentucky and Black Twist Are Combined Against the Backdrop of Machine Shop Oil and Chroming Residues. For the Philosophically Minded Dictator.

Sauerbratten Flake

A Muscular Tobacco Cased in Sauerkraut Juice. For Smokers with Dreams of Empire.

Commie Kake

Red Virginias Topped with the Bitter Residue of Failed Ambition.

Montgoobery

A Luxuriant Blend of Virginia Leaf Topped with Peanut Butter.

Lombeard

An Interesting Combination of Virginias, Orientals, and Alaskan Latakia. Gently Dusted with Our Secret Ingredient from Al the Pet Barber. An Entirely New Take on Hair Of The Dog.Our Worst Blend

Sawdust, Floor Sweepings, and Rat Droppings Adorn a Base of Cigar Ash and Used Nasal Snuff. A Gift for Treasured In-Laws.

Crown Revilement

Straight Perique Cased in a Paste of Refried Beans, Prune Juice, And Tabasco. Terrific When You Really Need To Get Going.

This perhaps makes the most sense when one understand pipe tobaccos—trust me, it’s actually quite hilarious.

As some of y’all may know, this blog is powered by Blosxom, a neat little file-based blogging engine. Well, it's written in Perl and is not the fastest program in the world; I decided to practise my Lisp skills and port Blosxom to ANSI Common Lisp. Right now Lisp Blosxom isn’t really usable, but every day it improves just a tad.

Jonah Goldberg offers a short history of American conservatism. One tends to forget when reading his oft-times flippant columns that he’s actually a deeply-intelligent, well-educated man. This particular piece is highly interesting, noting that the American conservative movement is in large part the creation of William F. Buckley. Read & enjoy.

Just came across Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?, a presentation by Charles Petzold on the process of programming. Very good points about the rhythm of coding and how we can come to over-rely on tools—as well as how that over-reliance can translate into much more complex (and hence brittle) systems. Anyone with an interest in human-computer interactions should take a look.

Well, it’s official: my kid brother & I are heading to Berlin in a few weeks. While there we hope to meet up with the third of us brothers, who has been spending a semester in Rhodes, Greece. The second of our number is off serving his country, and we will be certain to razz him for approximately the rest of our natural lives for not coming along…

It should be a cool trip. Over a decade ago I took a bit of German, but I’ve never been to the land. Stephen has no German, but we’ve gotten a couple of phrasebooks and he is, after all, a Uhl: he should have no problem. It’s an interesting nation, and we’ll have a good time. I can hardly wait!

Rosa Parks died yesterday. While certainly much of her fame was stage-managed (less mediagenic blacks who did the same as she did were ignored), one must admit that the incident in which she was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man was instrumental in ending the abominable practise of segregation.

We’re all familiar with hypocrisy on the Right: the senator who waves the banner of morality whilst cheating on his wife & so on; indeed, the mainstream media make sure we know all about that. But what about hypocrisy on the Left? Peter Schweizer has written a new book Do As I Say [Not As I Do]: Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy which points out, among other things, that:

• Nancy Pelosi accepts union awards but won’t hire union members in her vineyard or hotels
• Michael Moore invests in oil, military & HMO stocks
• Barbara Streisand spends $20,000 a year on watering her lawn
• Noam Chomsky castigates the rich for using tax shelters—but uses them himself

A most interesting-sounding tome.

Today is the 200th anniversary of the defeat of the French at the hands of Vice Admiral of the White The Right Honourable Horatio, Viscount Nelson, Knight of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. Let us all drink a toast to the immortal memory of Nelson and those who fell with him.

The Gender Genie attempts to guess the gender of an author from snippets of his writing. Oddly enough, it found my beer plaque story feminine but my missing Texas bit masculine. I remain…unconvinced.

Max Barry notices what ads really feature. Too true.

A Larry Bird fan demanded that his sentence be increased from 30 to 33 years, in honour of Larry bird, whose jersey was 33. This demonstrates everything I’ve been saying about sports for years. Healthy mind in a healthy body, certainly—but this man’s mind is by no means healthy!

While at Cellarman’s Pub, I’d the chance to take a photo of my plaque. There’s an interesting story behind it: you see, I had been a member of the Mug Club (24 oz. mug filled for the 16 oz. price) for a few years, but had never heard of the around-the-world club. One merely had to drink every beer they offered, and then the owner would erect a plaque in one’s honour above the bar. Unfortunately, there were 99 beers and I had just three weeks left in college. I wanted to show my plaque to my folks, and it would take a week to make; this left me two weeks to drink 99 beers—7 per day. Not really very doable.

So I struck a deal with the owner: he knew I was once of his best customers, and he knew that I’m an honest man; so he let me strike off the names of those beers I’d already had at his fine establishment. That managed to eliminate a great number of them. I forget now how many were left, but almost every day after class (I still had to worry about finishing my senior year!) I’d head on down to Cellarman’s to do my homework and try to strike a few more beers from the list. Finally, after the hardest two weeks in recorded history, I finished my labour in what I hoped might be time enough for the plaque to arrive and be installed. Unfortunately, it didn’t arrive until after graduation, and so my family was never able to see it.

But this year I took a photo, and while blurry it is proof before the entire world of my feat:

Marvel before me, all ye nations.

The week that I spent in Dallas really got me to thinking that there’d be several advantages to moving in that direction. My very best friends from college are there; indeed, I get the feeling that the last five years might have been altogether better had I stayed in the area. And of course the majority of my extended family are there as well, and I should like to spend much more time with them all. And Texans are pleasant, outgoing sorts; it might be easier to meet girls in such an environment.

On the other hand, there are things to dislike about the place. It is miserably, intolerably, abominably, atrociously hot, for one thing. While I was there, everyone commented on how much it had cooled down. If that’s cool, I don’t want to know heat! For another thing, there are way too many laws. There are even little signs everywhere reminding one of what those laws are! And the beer selection is just sad—and the prices angering. Also, I’m not certain about the food culture; it doesn’t seem as well developed down there.

I really don’t know what my preferences are. It’s keeping me up at night.

During the past several days I’ve run into many gals I used to know: some I had chased; some I had never cared for. It was odd to see how my reactions differed in each case: for quite a few it was relief (there but for the grace of God go I); for most, just a profound neutrality; and in one notable case the sneaking suspicion that she was the one that got away. It just goes to show that it’s deucedly impossible to predict the future. The girl who seems so pleasant and lovely today may be quite the opposite in a few years. This is among the advantages of bachelorhood: dealing with known quantities.

Well, I must say that our five-year reunion was more than a little disappointing. Not nearly as many folks showed up as I had expected (or had registered, apparently). I’ve no official figures, but there probably weren’t more than 32 or so. Out of a graduating class of approx. 250, that’s pretty damned disappointing. One factor may have been that the party was held at the house of the fellow who had headed up Student Life during our tenure—in other words, the Gestapo chief. He’s actually a decent enough fellow now, but we spent four long years evading his minions (smuggling girls & drinks into the dorms, mostly). I was fairly certain that someone would drop a fish in one of his hot-air registers, or take a leak in his flowerpots, but so far as I could tell nought like that happened.

But quite a few folks said that they knew of many who had gone elsewhere rather than attend a party at his house. Surely our reunion committee should have arranged for an off-campus venue, a DJ and such. I guess that can go into the Lessons Learnt for our 10 year reunion.

The big problem, of course, is that this was the reunion most likely to be well-attended (heck, one gal flew in with her husband from Baiku, Azerbaijan for that very reason): most of us are still relatively unattached, with no kids or other hindrances; those children which do exist are so young that they are not in school, and so small that they can be taken most anywhere. But given another five years that will no longer be the case; additionally, many of us will have much more demanding schedules, and will have moved on in the world and emotionally: there will be more reasons to stay at home and fewer to return to Austin College. It’s a real shame that this reunion wasn’t better run. Perhaps next time I’ll have to take charge.

I mentioned earlier how much like home AC felt on my arrival; it felt just as much like leaving home to depart. I spent the day on campus, touring the hallowed halls and walking the greens. This past evening in the full moonlight I retraced a path I trod many an evening, from Baker Hall (my dorm of three years) to Clyce Hall (the dorm many of the gals I knew lived in)—only now there was no girl to walk to the door; no Baker room to return to; no future, but only past.

I drove by the house I once lived in—a terrible, run-down place now, but dear to me then. I went through downtown Sherman, that den of land agents and lawyers—the downtown I used to walk to that wondrous summer. I saw professors, now older and greyer; I saw friends and acquaintances, also older and greyer. I saw the empty lot where a once-great hall stood, another empty lot which had been a cafeteria and gathering-place, and yet another lot which was the site of many a fine party. The accumulated memories of the four best years of my life returned in force.

There is a photo in the Tri-Gam 1996–1997 album which shows a young man smiling with his friends. He’s hardly more than a boy (just beginning to grow the traces of a beard), with limitless options and nothing but bright expectations. He’s happy and cheerful; the very world itself lay at his feet. He died five years ago.

I was able to revisit Cellarman's Pub yesterday. It is an absolutely wonderful place; before it was built, Sherman was a sad place for a beer lover, but now it is home to a pub which outshines every bar in Dallas and all but one bar in Denver (the one superior bar is, of course, the Falling Rock Taphouse). I actually have my name on a plaque above the bar, commemorating the fact that I drank at least one of every single beer they offered at the time (the hardest two weeks of my life, getting that done in time for graduation). The bartender/owner still remembered me, which was very nice.

They’ve expanded, again, which is great news. One always worries that a good place will shut down—particularly a place that nice in a town as sad as Sherman. But business seemed to be booming, and I believe that I can anticipate many happy homecoming weekends spent in the warm embrace of that fine pub.

So I’m up at AC’s homecoming carnival getting a cotton candy when the young lady serving them calls me sir. I laughingly tell her, Oh, I’m not a sir and she replies, Sorry, it’s a dad thing. I’m only 27, for Pete’s sake! You know, this dad business is getting really old. As, apparently, am I.

I went to my first Tri-Gam party in four years last night—it was a blast. The guys this year are a wonderful lot. One even invited me to sing their song with them, although I had to refuse (that honour is only for real Tri-Gams, not for mere hangers-on). One of my great regrets in life is never having tried to pledge Gamma Gamma Gamma; it was a great frat and most of my good friends were there. It’s not the things one does that one regrets nearly so much as the things one doesn’t do.

They say that you can never go back home—but they’re wrong. Yesterday I drove on up to Sherman, Tx. for my homecoming (apt name) and five-year reunion, and when I got to Sherman and stood on the Austin College campus, it was as though I’d never left. Yes, the campus has changed; yes, many excellent buildings were torn down by the ravenous administration—but despite all that, it feels as though I’d never left, and as though I could still be living there.

You can go back, and it’s worth it.

Last night I went over to my cousin Craig’s place to hang out for a bit. We walked into his flat and there were some of his friends there—one girl says, quite excitedly, Oh, Craig, is this your dad? I’m barely seven years older than he is, for Pete’s sake!

A US Army veteran was taken out of a hospital and dragged to the border for prosecution because he had grown marijuana to help alleviate the pain resulting from a failed parachute jump. When will this madness end?

Well, I’m down in Texas after a too-long absence. It’s homecoming season, and my five-year reunion is in a few short days, so it seemed meet to make the journey down here and see all my old friends once again. Incidentally, don’t get any bright ideas now that I’m away—my kid brother is house-watching, and has full access to my magazine. Breaking in is not a bright idea, although it’s likely to be one of the last…

I’m staying with my old friends Phil & Jess Forshee. To tell the truth, I was a bit nervous that we’d end up sitting across a table from one another & realise that we really don’t have anything in common any longer; after all, a good amount of friendship is due to close proximity. Despite a few misgivings at lunch, it turns out I needn’t have worried—we’re the same pals we were once upon a time, just quite a bit older than in 1996–2000.

Today should be fun: going to see my grandparents for lunch, then dinner with my aunt, uncle & cousins.

Well, after I fainted I did some reading up on the whole thing. My symptoms match something called postural hypotension—in layman’s terms it means that standing up can cause my blood pressure to drop too low; this fits in with the fact that several nurses have been shocked by how low my blood pressure is: it’s not beyond belief, then, that the differential applied by standing suddenly could be more than desired in my case. Interestingly, it appears that I’ve naturally gravitated towards things which are good remedies to low blood pressure. For example, the suggested remedies are to eat a high salt diet; to exercise the lower extremities; and to wear special socks. Well, I love salt (although I don’t eat as much as I’d like—something I shall change), I ride a bike and I’ve always loved wearing good high & tight woollen socks. Also, I enjoy tobacco, which raises blood pressure by constricting the blood vessels. In short, my body has been telling me to do exactly those things which are good for it. To be honest, I wonder what might have happened had I not been living as I do—I might have died of low blood pressure. Thank God for salt, cycling, socks & smoking.

This fits in perfectly with a theory I’ve held for a long time: if we only listen to what our bodies tell us, our health will be better. There is the example of a pregnant woman: her body suffers a deficiency in something-or-other, and thus she orders up ice cream topped with shrimp and spinach—and a medical examination would reveal that those foods contain exactly what she needed. There is also the fact that we are, among other things, animals, and that our Lord gave even the lowliest beast the ability to discern what it needs to survive. To ignore our better instincts is to ignore what is best for us (of course, there are other instincts and appetites which need to be suppressed).

It’s obvious from my appetite that what my health requires is more grease, more salt, more fried foods and more beer—who am I to deny Nature?

Tonight I had a very curious experience: I fainted. I was in my bathroom when suddenly my vision went grey—which has happened maybe a dozen times in as many years, generally when standing up too fast—and the next thing I knew I heard singing, then was lying in my bathtub with the shower door atop me and a nasty gash on my right ear. I was out for less than a minute (I know ’cause I’d looked at the clock before I’d entered the room). Very strange business. Next time the old vision goes grey I’ll be sure to lie down. Guess I need to get more salt in my diet.

Just finished watching Spies Like Us, which was a very funny film from the 1980s—funny, anyway, until it invented a ridiculous plot by a couple of high-ranking military officers to start a nuclear war between Russia & the US. It’s quite amazing that in the midst of the Cold War (the end-game, even) that such dross would be tossed about. And yet it was. The film industry was obviously well in the pocket of the Communists, as General Ion Pacepa (formerly chief of the Romanian espionage service), who has documented how thoroughly the Warsaw Pact took advantage of Western dupes and fellow-travellers to spread its lies. It came close to ruining the film, but fortunately the presence of Vanessa Angel & Donna Dixon managed to get me by:-)

Some years back the Music Genome Project was started in an attempt to classify as many songs as possible; Pandora is the culmination of that effort. One simply tells it a few musicians or songs one likes, and it uses fairly significant human analysis of the songs in its database (over 300,000, I believe) to predict some more in the same style which you might like. Pretty cool—cool enough to get me to spring $36 for a year’s membership.

Today I went to the mall to find some new clothes, it being a few years since I’ve bought any winter wear. I’m reminded why it’s been so long: there is absolutely nothing good about shopping for clothes. There’s no rhyme or reason to what looks good and what doesn’t; indeed, the only discernible rule is that if one’s a fashion model then one can wear anything, and if one’s not the one might as well give up.

I envy married fellows: a married man can simply say, Darling, when I return I’d like to have some nice-looking new clothes, and when he gets back home the Clothes Gnomes have left him a nice new wardrobe. A man with a girlfriend can go shopping with her; even a guy with a sister has an advantage. But I am completely forlorn, since my parents failed to provide me a sister and I have thus far been and utter failure with the fair sex.

You know, I really loved it back in college when I was wearing coat & tie—yeah, I stuck out like a sore thumb, but I was a happy sore thumb. I understand coat & tie; I can buy shirts and suits and blazers and ties without worry. Maybe I should just write off this experiment in dressing like a normal chap my age, give in and return to my element.

Yesterday morning I went to my car (driving in to work this week rather than cycling) and discovered that the windscreen was covered in ice: the first frost of the season has struck, and soon the cold will be upon us. This morning I wore a sweater for the first time; soon it will be long coats and scarves. Woo-hoo!

NRO gives Serenity high marks. Told ya it was good…

Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum takes on the insipid Commander in Chief, pointing out that its world of sexism and such quite simply doesn’t exist.

Apparently more bikes than cars have been bought over the last year. Woo-hoo! Maybe someday motorcar culture will be a bit attenuated. I don’t want it to go away—cars are useful and good—but it’d be nice for it to be less of a factor.

I just found a life of Nikola Tesla’s father Milutin. Tesla, of course, was the inventor of radio amongst many other things, and was the quintessential 19th century mad scientist. His father, though, was a Serbian Orthodox priest who fought for the rights of the Orthodox when they were under Austrian Catholic rule. The postscript to the story is sobering:

There are no surviving sermons of Milutin Tesla. His birth house in Raduc was burnt down in 1941. The Serbian villages in the Medak pocket were burnt down in 1993. The Church of St. George the Martyr in Gospic was demolished in 1992. The house and church in Smiljan, extensively renovated in the years after 1863, were burnt down in 1941; rebuilt in the 1980s; partially burnt down, and vandalized, in 1992; and now stand empty, subject to hatefilled political spinning. 590 Smiljan Serbs were massacred in 1941; and the remainder, said to be only eleven people, were ethnically cleansed in 1995.

Note that the destruction under the Nazis was not so bad as under the Croats.

I’ve recently been using Froogle; it’s a Google service which enables one to search through a huge number of online stores and find the best price on items. Very, very cool—and it’s saved me quite a bit of cash.

After the beer festival, Jethro & I were picked up by my kid brother, who then picked up his girlfriend, and we headed out to a special private midnight premiere of Serenity, the feature film based on the excellent, short-lived 2002 TV series Firefly. My verdict? Well worth seeing.

Firefly was a truly excellent show; I’ve written about it, and written again, but for those new to the series, here’s a brief description: it’s the far future, and mankind has finally colonised the stars. The interior planets are built up and civilised; the frontier planets are rough-and-tumble, mostly rural places where horses are still used for transport. The show had a kind of sci-fi/Western flavour (the creator, Joss Whedon, had previously done the horror/high school mixture known as Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and it got that down dead right. It was great, but Fox aired the shows out of order, pre-empted them for other programming and generally did its best to kill the show, finally succeeding before the season was done.

But the show did manage to pick up a few fans, and it managed to get a DVD release, which release did so unbelievably well that Universal decided that it was worth giving Whedon a shot at the big time: a full-length theatrical film. Thus was Serenity born.

The movie is in many ways excellent, but the dialogue is perhaps its best feature. Whedon’s forte has always been witty, pop-culture-literate dialogue, and Serenity doesn’t disappoint. The look of the film—a mixture of cowboy Western and high-tech—is very successful. I want to live on those worlds!

I’m not certain how successful the film will be among those not already fans; it seems to do a good job of introducing the backstory, but it’s hard to imagine many becoming invested in the characters over the few short minutes (1:59) of the movie.

It’s not perfect, of course. My major criticism is that it feels far too TV-like; in fact immediately after seeing it I said that it was the best TV movie I’ve ever seen. But it was good, and it should be seen, and Firefly needs to get back onto TV so we can see how it plays out.

Last night I went to my sixth consecutive Great American Beer Festival, for the fourth time with my buddy Russell/Jethro (Russel’s his real name; Jethro is his persona’s name in the SCA); I’ve gone once on my own, and once with my buddy Phil. The festival was a complete blast—lots of excellent beer & lots of beautiful girls. They get prettier every year!

This year the food court was greatly reduced in size, which was a real shame; hopefully next year there’ll be more choice than a standard concession stand and over-priced Old Chicago’s pizza ($7 for a four-slice pan pizza).

As always, the beers impressed. We were able to try some wonderful ones which are completely unavailable here in town. It always saddens me that I can’t walk down the street and get the superb New Glarus beers in Colorado.

Bruichladdich allows members of the public to buy casks of single-malt scotch; they’ll even store it for ten years for free. It's about £800 ($1,415), and yields over 300 bottles—that’s less than $5/bottle. The distillery will bottle it up for you with whatever label you wish. The perfect gift for the man who has everything!

Betsy Hart points out that the mainstream media condone fornication, adultery, divorce and under-age partying—but won’t show a photo of a celebrity smoking. Smoking is the One Great Taboo of our era: it’s okay to do drugs, but not smoke; it’s okay to abandon one’s children, but not smoke; it’s okay to lead an empty, shallow, hedonistic and ultimately sad life—but if one durst enjoy the aroma of burning tobacco leaves, then one is considered a moral degenerate, a profligate, a bad role model and a poor example for others.

Well, I’ve now officially gone for more than one month on a single tank of gas. The day I last filled my tank, I drove over 100 miles, and I’ve still more than a quarter-tank left to go; there’s a very real possibility than I could someday make two months without a fill. In fact, if I get a rain suit and start cycling to church, I might go for months without using my car. Wouldn’t that be cool?

I just discovered a wonderful web site: Ruined Endings. It has a plot synopsis and the ending to all sorts of films. Saves one the bother of watching suspense flicks. Rather ad-laden site, though.

David Mery writes in the Guardian about his arrest for the crime of looking down at the stairs as he walked and wearing a raincoat. This is worse than anything I’ve heard of here in the States. From everything I can tell, Britain has become quite an authoritarian nightmare.

It’s fall once again; the leaves will soon turn their multitudinous colours and the air will have a bit of a chill to it. At last the cruel hot reign of summer is ended; too soon the frigid rule of winter will set in. But for now it is autumn, the grandest of the seasons, the time for romance and love; the time for life and joy; the time to drink in each and every moment. Ring the changes: the Season of Seasons is here!

I just received my copy of the Computers & Typesetting Millennium Edition Boxed Set. It’s comprised of five volumes: The TeXbook, describing the operation of the TeX typesetting system; TeX: The Program, the complete, annotated source to TeX (with errata & corrections); The METAFONTbook, describing the operation of the METAFONT font description system; METAFONT: The Program, the complete, annotated source to METAFONT; and Computer Modern Typefaces, which holds the entire source to the Computer Modern family of fonts, including Roman, Bold, Italic, Sans-Serif and Monospaced fonts. I am a happy geek today!

last.fm provides music-tracking and Internet radio. You install a plug-in for your music player, and last.fm can figure out folks who listen to music you like, and check out their tunes. You install their free player, and you can listen to a custom radio station which they believe you’ll like. One’s friends can even listen to a radio station customised to one’s own preferences. It’s pretty sweet.

I’m eadmund there.

Jack Dunphy castigates a New Orleans police officer for staying with his wife rather than coming in to work. I could not possibly disagree more. A man’s first duty is to his wife & children, not to his job or the State. If the flood waters are rising, his job is to protect his family. If there are looters, his job is to protect his family and his property. Only if his family and home are secure is he at liberty to aid others. That’s a simple fact of decency.

Well, after thirty years chasing the deadly shuttle pipe-dream, NASA has gone back to a proven launch technology: rockets. Rockets are cheap; rockets are safe; and rockets are the future, not the flying deathcrate we&rquo;ve spent untold billions of dollars pursuing. It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong, and it’s even more difficult for a bureaucracy to do so, but under this administration they have. Now we’re finally headed back to the moon, with the plan to establish a permanent lunar base, and some day to proceed on to Mars. I have often stated my opposition to excessive space exploration, but if we’re to do it, at least let us do it properly—and it appears we will be doing so, and soon.

Arrr, today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day and I did nearly forget it, shiver me timbers and whatnot. Never again, I do swear, by my little dog’s grave and my peg leg!

My bike passed the 900 mile mark today on the way home from work. I hit 700 on the 14th of July, 68 days ago. Thus I find that I’m averaging 2.9 miles a day. Shoot, I really need to ride more often.

Former President—and current disgrace—Bill Clinton wants to raise taxes to pay for Hurricane Katrina. I’m still not entirely clear on why folks in the other 49 states bear the responsibility for paying the tab for a bunch of folks who built their city in a bathtub between two large bodies of water and didn’t bother to get flood insurance; now Clinton wants us to pay even more in taxes for the privilege? If we must help New Orleans (which is not an unreasonable position to take), then surely we should finance that help by cutting imbecilic programs instead of raising our already horrendous taxes by even a fraction of a percent.

Recently reading a few websites by sceptics like James Randi (no link given, as I don’t wish to promote him), I’m struck by how nasty the confirmed sceptical atheist is. He thinks that love is just an evolutionary adaption: fraternal love helps us survive as a group; erotic love helps us propagate the species. He thinks that altruism is the same thing: something to help our species survive against others.

I don’t want to live in a world in which love is nothing more than a chemical process, in which friendship is just a thymic byproduct, and anger is merely a storm in the soup of my brain. To tell the truth, that seems an almost psychopathic way to go through life—and my experience with true atheists shows that to be the case. Agnostics are rather better.

Now, a certain degree of scepticism is healthy. Our Lord gave us the reasoning faculty for a reason; part of that reason is to discern between truth and falsehood, between good and evil. But the starting point of discernment is not a blank slate—it can’t be, as demonstrated so aptly by Gödel all those years ago. The most embittered sceptic is just as credulous as the most unthinking follower of a charlatan, believe it or not, for everything—even mathematics—must be taken on faith. If faith (i.e. taking unproven assertions as true) is necessary, then it is needful to determine what the starting set of assertions will be.

A good starting set would be the Nicene Creed & Peano’s Axioms. With the one matters of the spirit can be determined; with the other, matters physical.

Stephanie Mencimer reviews Keith Bradsher’s High and Mighty: SUVs. Makes some excellent points: of most note would be the fact that SUVs are more dangerous than proper autos. Also interesting is the market research demonstration that SUV owners are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others.

Although by that reckoning perhaps I should own one…

Warren Bell has a hilarious piece lampooning American’s absurd safety-consciousness. It’s hard to believe that we’re the same nation which conquered a continent, subjugated the savages, nixed the Nazis and mastered the moon. Instead we have become a mass of worriers.

The Flash Flag is a truly brilliant idea: a reflective flag mounted horizontally on a spring-jointed arm attached to one’s bike. It sticks out and waves, warning drives to stay well to the side. I’m going to get a whole set and hopefully never have to worry too much about driving maniacs again.

Telemarketers have scripts which enable them to take control of the conversation and keep you off balance. Why not do the same? Enter the Anti-Telemarketing Counter-Script. Absolutely brilliant, and hilarious too.

Back in 1997 Marcus Ranum came up with the concept of Artificial Ignorance. Rather than rely on an intelligent system to report interesting data, he used a stupid system to ignore boring data. By definition, anything left over has to be interesting. A nice way of approaching a difficult problem—in this case, log file analysis.

From Switzerland comes the Zero Emission Machine, or ZEM. It’s a four-seater pedal-powered vehicle (a two-seater is also available). The whole family can hop on and take it for a spin, which is pretty cool. The body can even be used as a billboard, reducing the total cost of ownership for the $9,000 vehicle.

A recent rec.bicycles.misc post led me to Vanilla Bicycles. I’m left speechless; these are some of the most beautiful bikes I have ever seen. One of those tourers will be mine someday.

John Derbyshire reviews Empires of the Word, a fascinating-sounding book about languages and how they increase in popularity and die out. I must get a copy.

I found this site today: a PVC flamethrower. This is truly the most wonderful device ever invented, no?

I just discovered the Leitra, a fully-enclosed recumbent tricycle. It’s a very cool design, and with an electric motor added might make a very decent car replacement.

Shortly after Hurricane Charley, David Brown illustrated how so-called price gouging saves lives. It does this by encouraging vendors to meet needs, and by fairly rationing goods in a manner that state rationing cannot. The innumerate fools in charge in the South are killing people with their ludicrous anti-gouging measures.

I never thought that I would write these words, but George W. Bush is an idiot; he recently spoke out against price gouging. Well, the sad fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as price gouging. Thomas Sowell aptly demonstrated that it’s proper for prices to rise after a disaster. For example, after a storm a chainsaw is more valuable than it had been before—shouldn’t items sell for their value? And in fact they do—if the price is more than an item’s worth, people won’t pay it. It’s impossible to sell something for more than it’s worth. I note that the news has recently reported gas lines—well, if gas prices were allowed to rise quickly enough, there would be no lines: when it’s sufficiently expensive people will only buy it when they need it.

Someone, get our president (and our legislators, and the majority of our public commentators) some lessons in simple economics.

I just discovered the web page of Kris Holm, a mountain unicyclist. This man is insane! But cool. In an insane way.

Just discovered Bookcrossing. The idea is that you label a book and release it into the wild—that is, leave it on a bench, or at a coffeeshop, or give it away. Then you can track its progress as different readers find it, read it and pass it on. Kinda cool little idea.

The Denver Post reports on the resurgence in cocktails. This can only be a good thing: a properly made cocktail inspires one to slow down, to appreciate the taste of one’s drink, and to cogitate on the world at large. While I am in many ways a beer geek, I’ve enjoyed many an excellent cocktail when the time was right.

I think that there must be an airshow going on today (although I can find nothing going on)—several flights of WWII-era aircraft just flew overhead towards the aeroport. Very cool, and very loud. I want one!

Makewavs will take old records and tapes, digitally record & process the sound (removing clicks, pops and so on) and create CDs with the music thereon, all for around $12-24/album (depending on amount of processing, options and so forth). They can also make MP3s, although honestly it’s so easy to do that from a CD that I’d not bother.

It’s with a heavy heart that I must report the closing of Wilkinson Sword after 233 years of service (the company was founded in 1772, before even the American Revolution). Apparently they weren’t able to survive in the limited modern sword market (which is odd, considering how many more excellent swordsmiths are making a profit these days; there’s a market, and with their name they should have been able to survive). Generations of young Englishmen went into battle armed with Wilkinson’s swords, and tens (hundreds?) of thousands of the Empire’s foes fell before them.

When my own brother graduated from the US Naval Academy in ’02, the other three of us boys got together and bought him a Wilkinson US Naval Officer’s sword. It’s a beauty, and much nicer than any other I’ve laid eyes upon.

The closing of Wilkinson is the end of an era, and a damned shame. Sic transit gloria mundi.

A women filed a complaint against her physician because he told her to lose weight, and the New Hampshire Attorney General is investigating. What in God’s name is the world coming to?!?

The Attorney General of Tennessee has asked a country singer to stop glamorising the use of chewing tobacco. Never mind that she’s free to speak her mind, and that it’s entirely inappropriate for the State to ask her to stop.

The song in question tells how she enjoys the taste of chaw on a man’s lips. An odd fetish, to be sure, but hardly one which is a legitimate State concern.

This is quite ludicrous: UT Austin is removing the books from its undergrad library. The space once filled with thousands of volumes of knowledge will instead feature a cafe, computers and comfy chairs. They seem to think that the net can provide enough information.

This is, quite frankly, pure & unadulterated poppycock. There are many more books in libraries than online, and many of them are excellent. I would never have read Esmé Wingfield-Stratford’s King Charles the Martyr online. I’d never have found The Pooh Perplex online. I’d never have been able to write my German history papers in college from online sources. Are von Tirpitz’s memoirs even available online?

Well, Google finally released their Jabber-based chat service. It looks like it could be a beautiful thing. I’m there as eadmund42 at gmail dot com; talk to me.

I recently discovered CAcert, a fine non-profit which issue free SSL certificates. Thawte, VeriSign & the rest charge hundreds of dollars; CAcert charge nothing at all. Now you can get a personal certificate for nothing; you can server certificates for nothing. It’s very cool.

Install CAcert’s root certificate today and then go check out Octopodial Chrome (HTTPS) for an encrypted, secure blogging experience.

Back in 1980, Gregg Easterbrook wrote Beam Me Out of This Death Trap, Scotty, a penetrating look into the idiocy of the shuttle programme. For a mere fraction of the cost of the shuttle, we could have developed better rockets; for that matter, we could have continued using the cheap rockets we already had. Instead, we went on with a programme which has lead to one astronaut dead for every eight flights.

Dr. Dorothy Robinson believes so:

…Dr. Dorothy Robinson’s concern, instead, is bicycle safety. She has just published a study in the Health Promotion Journal of Australia that is likely to send shock waves through Australian cycling communities with its claim that mandatory bicycle helmet laws increase rather than decrease the likelihood of injuries to cyclists.

Food for thought.

Today I rode from my home to my folks’ and back. Hard ride there (not helped by the weight of the change of clothes in my panniers); easy ride back. Now that I’ve done it and know I can, I’ll have to do it more often. Someday I’d like to start riding to church regularly.

Well, after a fair amount of deliberation we decided that there simply wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict the defendant of the charge against her. The case was a fairly simple one, but with some tangled bits.

A 15 year old girl, Jennifer Clayburn, overdosed on some prescription drug in an apparent suicide attempt in September of 2003. While at the hospital for observation, she told a counsellor that her attempt was due to distress over and event which had happened early that summer, when she was raped by her boyfriend Jeremy Gurley, a young man some four years her senior. Her story was that she & Jeremy (19) were at the home of their friend Jamie Davis (16), and that Jamie’s mom, Amber Irene Spaziano, had bought her Jägermeister and/or Rumplemintz, poured her Red Bull & Jäger shots and urged her to drink; later on, Jennifer, Jamie & Jeremy (way too many J-names… in this case) retired to Jamie’s bedroom, where Jamie proceeded to suggest a three-way kiss (a phrase of which we all grew quickly sick), and that Jennifer went along with it for awhile, tried to disengage and was then raped by Jeremy. Four months later, distraught over this incident, she tried to kill herself by taking too much of one of her meds. This, at least, was what she alleged.

Our job was to determine if the defendant, Mrs. Spaziano, had contributed to the delinquency of a minor by providing Jennifer with alcohol, as claimed in this story. The whole rape issue was really a red herring, an appeal to emotion. Our concern wasn’t to determine whether or not Jennifer had been raped, but whether Mrs. Spaziano had given her a drink.

As it turned out, the sole witness to this drink-giving was Miss Clayburn herself, and she wasn’t a very reliable witness. She was very out-of-sorts, as though on severe medication, and her testimony was itself unconvincing, although had it been corroborated may have been believable. The prosecution called four other witnesses: a former sheriff’s deputy, who had investigated the nearly five-month old charges in late October of ’03; Miss Clayburn’s parents, who had no actual evidence to provide (they were not there that night, and hence could not say whether or not Mrs. Spaziano had done anything at all); and Mr. Gurley, who stated under oath that he, Miss Davis and Miss Clayburn had taken some beer from the fridge when Mrs. Spaziano was out on her balcony having a smoke. One would think it unusual for a prosecution witness to undermine the prosecution’s case so directly.

As you can see, the prosecution didn’t have much of a case: one witness alleging a crime; one witness denying it took place; and three witnesses with no knowledge of anything relevant (that’s a slight exaggeration, as they had some information pertaining to the date of a tongue-piercing which helped place the day of the alleged incident). But what about the defence?

They called a Keith something-or-other, essentially a non-entity who had been there that evening, a friend of one of Mrs. Spazziano’s sons, who had nothing very substantive to add, save that he said she had never allowed children to drink in her home, and that he hadn’t seen them drinking. Then Jimmy Aragon, a friend of hers who was there that night, testified essentially the same thing: that he & she had been drinking, but that she never gave the kids anything, and that she never let kids drink anyway. Then her daughter testified the same thing, and finally the defendant herself took the stand and testified essentially the same thing.

When I write the same thing, the reader should know that what I mean is that the gist of the stories was the same; the actual stories differed in mostly non-important details. One person said that the beer had been in cans; another in bottles; another in cans first, but then bottles were purchased. Or one person spoke of Jägermeister and another of a clear bottle, when every elementary school student knows that Jägermeister comes in green bottles. But the fundamental elements were the same.

So as a jury we were faced with one spaced-out witness stating one thing, and five witnesses stating another thing. There were some ancillary matters, such as who had which motives, but that was the basic issue. Could we in good conscience hand down a felony conviction with such scant evidence?

Naturally, we could not. I can’t say that the defendant was innocent, but I don’t know that she was guilty. The State of Colorado failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she had, indeed, knowingly given minors alcohol, and so we had to find her not guilty. I must say that watching her reaction when the judge read the verdict made me feel quite glad for her sake, whether or not she was guilty.

Incidentally, my co-jurors initially asked me to be foreman, but I turned down the honour. I don’t think I should care for all eyes to be on me.

Well, yet more evidence for me being in God’s favour—either that, or obviously stupid. I was just selected for a jury, the second time in two summonses. It could be that I appear such a moron that lawyers want me on a jury ’case they believe that I’m easily persuadable (how little they know!), but I don’t think so. Random chance can’t explain being in the front portion of the line twice in a row; it can’t explain surviving the double-cut (used here in Colorado) twice. So I think that this must be proof that the Author of Creation wishes me to serve. Mostly this is because I really don’t wish to believe that all my life’s luck was rolled up into passing jury selection—I’d have much preferred, say, luck with girls or on the stock market.

Anyway, more on the case when it’s completed. For now, I am enjoined to keep my lips buttoned.

Some time ago I read about the Retirement InCome—for Everyone (RIC-E) Trust, and was intrigued by the idea (albeit chagrined at the ego of its creator, one Ric Edelman). Still, it’s interesting: for a $300 fee and $5,000 or more in cash, one can set up a tax-deferred trust for anyone. In return, the recipient receives an investment vehicle which is invisible for purposes of bankruptcy, divorce, federal student aid &c., and which guarantees that it will be used for retirement: the giver specifies the earliest age at which money may be withdrawn. The services of Edelman’s investment advice company are free, but if one wishes then one can use another firm instead. Moreover, anyone can add money to the trust in $500 increments—this means that the recipient can use it as a supplement to his 401(k) and IRAs. A trustee who is neither the recipient nor the giver (nor either’s spouse) must be named, but the recipient may replace the trustee at any time.

Certain of the advantages above make me wonder if it might not be worthwhile for my brothers & to set funds up for one another. I could create one for Thomas, and name Stephen the trustee; Thomas could create one for John, and name me the trustee; John could create one for Stephen, and name Thomas the trustee; and Stephen could create one for me, and name John the trustee (each giving equal amount, so in the end none would gain or lose). Then we’d each have an investment good for retirement or disability, provided with a highly-qualified investment advice, but otherwise under the radar for all other purposes, which would be quite valuable. We’d be protected, too, since if there were a falling-out between brothers then trustees could be changed.

The sole problem is that even for me $5,300 is a fair chunk of change to part with until I’m 59½. Still, it’s a pretty good idea.

I recently discovered Vintage Velos, a company which offer real wool cycling jerseys, shorts & socks, among other woollen cycling wear. I really want the Vittadello and Cinzano jerseys, and I’d love to be trim enough to get away with one of the Unis Sport after-race shirts. I’ve a feeling that I’ll be spending a very great deal of money with these folks in the future. But it’ll be worth it not to be wearing synthetic fibres.

Saw an interesting article in USA Today about the President and cycling. Apparently he took it up two years ago when he was forced to stop running, and has now gotten good enough that he outpaces many other folks. The man can hit 20 mph on a dirt flat, which is pretty amazing to me.

I recently discovered The Online Pipe Tobacco Cellar. Very cool idea: one enters info about one’s personal collection of tobaccos, and it tracks it.

I just discovered the alt.smokers.pipes Pay It Forward programme. It’s a means for a beginning pipe smoker to get his hands on a pipe and some decent tobacco completely free (although the hope is that he’ll return the favour someday). It’s not the cheapest hobby in the world to get started at (one needs 7x as many pipes as one smokes in a day, and a rack, and tampers, stands, ashtrays, tobacco jars and the like). In my youth I was helped out by several folks (a professor at college gave me a wonderful large Talamona, and the father of a good friend gave me his old rack & jar); maybe I’ll donate some cash to the programme in the hopes of paying my debt.

The Independent reports that roughly 1 out of 25 fathers is unknowingly raising a child not his own. How’s that for a sobering thought?

Apparently back in ’91 there was a fad for eating dishes made with tobacco. Naturally, this highly annoyed certain nattering nabobs of negativism. Interestingly, a Danish restaurant just had a tobacco dinner. I’d always figured that tobacco was too poisonous to eat, but I suppose it’s true that it’s the dose which makes the poison. I’ll have to try a very small pinch of ground baccy as a seasoning in my next soup or something—or maybe add a slight bit to some steak marinade.

According to a BBC article on cycling, there are 42 cycling deaths per billion kilometres. A British billion is 1,000,000,000,000; my daily commute is 4.7 miles; that means my chance of death is 3.1768451e-10 each day—or 1 in 3,147,777,100. I’m willing to take a 1 in 3 (American) billion chance. Granted, that’s 13½ times as likely as were I in a car. But I’m not too worried.

Have you ever had a cyclist claim that a helmet saved his life? Of course, that’s not necessarily the case: yes, he was wearing a helmet, and yes he hit his head—but did the helmet make a difference? Would he have crashed without a helmet (there’s evidence that helmet wearers take more risks)? Would he have hit his head without the helmet (there’s evidence that helmet-wearers are 7 times more likely to hit their heads)? Would he have died if he had hit his head (doubtful, since helmets provide such little protection).

I’ve fallen a few times, and as the link predicts, every one of my falls damaged my arms and hands, but never my head.

It appears that Cadillac are making bicycles now. Are bikes the next SUV?

Unfortunately these are massively over-priced and under-delivering, from what I can tell.

Today we’d a picnic at work—and got the entire rest of the afternoon off! Granted. by the time I got home it was 1600, but that’s still an hour I’d not have had otherwise. Free food is free food, and free time is free time. Woo-hoo!

I saw Sky High last week with my buddy Dean and his wife Chrisanne. My verdict? A surprisingly enjoyable bit of fluff. No, it’s not a classic for the ages, but it’s a decent way to spend an evening—and that’s really all I’m looking for in a film. It had some good clean laughs (if unbelievable: high schoolers don’t take over houses to throw parties with soda), and had some good humour for adults tossed in, as well as the great B-list talents of Bruce Campbell (Army of Darkness, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.).

The stars are a bit too young for me to identify with, but they did a good job. The male lead, Michael Angarano, did his job—although as I noted it’s really hard to sympathise with someone playing high school frosh. Danielle Panabaker (playing the cute girl-next-door the hero somehow never notices, a common plot element which I’ve never been able to believe) is one to keep an eye out for in the future; in a few years she should be quite attractive and provided she makes some good career decisions should do well for herself.

The co-stars were great. Alongside the aforementioned Campbell (as the high school coach) were Kurt Russell as the gruff and loving dad and Kelly Preston as the mom. When, pray tell, did Kelly Preston get old enough to believably play the mother of a high schooler? Did I miss the memo?

All in all, lots of fun and worth seeing.

Therion is a really cool bit of free software for making maps of caves. I almost wish that I were a spelunker.

This Saturday I rode in my first cycling event, an extremely short (6 mi.) charity event for IOCC. It was fun enough, although I made two mistakes. One was due to my inexperience with cycling cleats: after a long smooth downhill I came to a very nice stop—the only problem was that I forget to unclip from my pedals, and hence suffered a nasty fall. Thankfully, due to my other mistake no-one saw me. Y’see, the guy leading the ride chose to travel at an infuriatingly slow rate (I was doing 70 rpm or so in my slowest normal gear), and so I chose to ride on ahead, asking first if the trail were marked out properly. Naturally, I was told that it was, and naturally it wasn’t (but I’ll admit of course the fault is mine for being impatient). But due to this little miscalculation the riders were all about a mile in another direction entirely when I’d my spill, so it all works out for the best.

Today is Sysadmin Appreciation Day. I expect my Ferrari by 1500.

So today I finally broke down and purchased bike shorts. Yes, they’s ridiculous spandex (actually, several generations past spandex in the engineered-fabrics line, but anyway…) monstrosities, but they do hold the muscles in a good position, and they’re a lot cooler than trousers.

So I get home and figure that I might as well take a pair for a spin, which I do. And on my route whom should I come across at an intersection other than my pastor and his wife? God has a sense of humour.

PETA operates an animal shelter in Norfolk, Va. What they don’t tell you is that the PETA shelter kills many times more animals than it takes in. They are so insane (one of their beliefs is that beasts are no less valuable than men) that they kill animals rather than let them become pets (another of their beliefs is that keeping a pet is equivalent to owning a slave).

I was speaking to my sister-in-law today and she raised the subject of how cheap it is to cycle. This is something I’ve wanted to blog on for the last week or two, and now I’ve an excuse. So here goes!

My bike has 769 miles on it right now, after over year’s commuting to work (and using it for miscellaneous errands). I’ll be generous and assume that every one of those miles was one that I’d have driven (this is not actually the case, for today and last Saturday I rode for the sake of riding, and last year I spent a fair amount of time in Boulder riding after work). My car gets about 35 miles a gallon, so that works out to almost 22 gallons of gas unused; at today’s gas prices that’s as near $50 as makes no difference.

Pretty good, right? Not really. That bike cost in the vicinity of ten times that, and what with inner tubes, a new tyre, cycling shorts and jerseys, an air pump and so forth much, much more.

My car, OTOH, cost me about $4,800 almost six years ago, and I've put over 60,000 miles on it and spent about $4,000 on it. So that’s $8,800 for the car. Annual insurance is about $500, so let’s say $3,000 in insurance. In my car 60,000 miles would take about 3,850 gallons; at today’s prices that would be $8,675 (although it was much cheaper six years ago—less than half the price, but let’s try to make driving look as expensive as possible). So all told that’s $20,475 to travel 60,000 miles, or about 34¼¢ per mile (a bit less than the IRS-approved 36½¢ per mile).

I’ve spent around $750 on my bike and accessories: let’s just say that it costs $1/mile to ride my bike, much more than than 34¼¢ per mile. Those 769 miles would have cost $265 to drive, much less than I’ve spent on cycling: about a third, in fact. Granted the cost of riding a mile right now is essentially nil, cycling—at least for me—doesn’t seem to be economical. But it has gotten me healthier, and that’s worth something. If I were the sort of person to get a gym membership, then I could count that savings, but I’m not and so I can’t.

Now, if I keep this up for another three years then maybe cycling will break even or start to show a profit.

This picture says it all.

Rebecca Hagelin makes an excellent point: we have programmes which tell teenagers to Just Say No to smoking, to drugs and to alcohol—but when it comes to sex, we say, Sure, whatever, or at most we tell them Don’t have sex, but if you do, use a condom. We don’t tell them to smoke a pipe if they must smoke; we don’t tell them to use uncut cocaine if they must snort the stuff; we don’t tell them to make sure to drink a few glasses of water and take an aspiring before retiring in order to prevent a hangover. Why the inconsistency?

For my part, I’d rather 17 year olds smoke a cigarette or drink a beer, or even smoke a joint, than have sex: none of those vices have lasting effects on one’s psychology and soul.

Will Judge Roberts be a pro-life judge? Edward Whelan demonstrates that he will be a true moderate. The point is that the Constitution of the United States of America simply doesn’t speak to the matter: it neither says that abortion must be legal, nor that it must be illegal—and it’s not the job of the judiciary to create laws but to interpret the law as written. An honest pro-abortion judge would be good for the pro-life movement because he would recognise that, under the Constitution as it’s currently written, the states have the right to regulate the practise.

Now, I support a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion in every circumstance save the saving of the mother’s life; abortion is in my opinion the single most important political issue of our age (I’ll write more about this later). But the fact of the matter is that currently there is nothing in the Constitution which can be reasonably interpreted either way.

Practical Common Lisp is an excellent introduction to and tutorial for ANSI Common Lisp. The author guides one through the creation of an MP3-streaming server, all the while introducing one to the amazing features of this most powerful of computer languages.

CNN reports that a Californian grocery clerk is next in line to be the Earl of Essex; the current earl is a childless 61-year-old bachelor, so the Californian’s odds are pretty good. This might be a hoax—one never knows—but what a wonderful story if it’s true.

My new account has a locker room, and in this locker room there sits a small couch. It occurred to me that rather than spending my lunch hour eating out at a restaurant or goofing off at my workstation, I could instead hit the sack and catch some Zs.

There’s nothing quite so relaxing as a nice, legitimate catnap in the middle of the day. I don’t know why more folks don’t think of it, but I’m glad they don’t, since there’s only the single rack to go around.

I’ve a page up now with pictures of my German branch sword & its scabbard. Do take a look.

What a day I’ve had, and it’s not even noon yet: I rode 7½ miles on my bike, exercised, went for a dip and showered all before 0800. It feels good to get the heart pumping and the blood flowing, it really does. Why, I might even get some housecleaning done today!

What are the major problems with cars? They waste huge amounts of energy; they pollute the air; they are dangerous; they require roads and highways, which are expensive to build; they are expensive and require a fair amount of capital outlay. But in return they are convenient: one need’t wait around for one’s own car, and one’s car is located near where one is (no having to go to a station); they are private: noöne rides one’s car without permission; they are relatively non-stop (in comparison to buses or trains, which—unless they are express routes—must stop at every single stop); they run 24/7.

Light rail solves some but not all of the problems of cars, but it eliminates some of the advantages as well. It costs approximately as much to move a light rail car full of passengers as it does to move one which is empty (the cars are still fairly heavy); there is a significant amount of capital investment; light rail tracks require a large amount of land. Light rail is only convenient if one lives or works very close to a station, and even when one does, one must wait around for a car; a light rail car is shared, and one cannot escape a nuisance passenger until the next stop; speaking of which, the train must stop at every station; and light rail has operating hours: stay downtown a minute too long, and one gets to take a taxi ride home ($55 for me). Where I used to live there was a light rail stop 30 minutes’ walk away; I loved it, but quite honestly most people would never used such a thing. Where I live now, there’s nothing—a public transportation trip home from downtown would take at least two hours, whereas by car it’s less than 20 minutes. A new line will open near me, but to move from it to the next station on the same latitude will involve going all the way to downtown, transferring, then going all the way back south again.

Well, a new system, called personal rapid transit, solves many of these problems. The idea is to construct a grid network—just like the roads—of narrow (half the size of a road lane) elevated, ground-level or underground lines. Along these travel small cars capable of holding three people apiece, controlled by computer. But here’s the cool bit: each car can go wherever it needs to go, whenever it needs to go (the central computer ensures that cars do not collide).

Here’s the usage scenario: one walks to the nearest PRT stop (and one is never more than ¼ mile away—anyone can walk this without a moment’s thought), goes up to the ticket machine, punches in a destination, pays for the ticket, then goes to a car which is already waiting, climbs in, shuts the door and is quickly (25–40 mph) shuttled to one’s destination. It’s convenient; it’s cheap (estimates I’ve seen are 12¢ + 20¢/mile—cheaper than RTD Light Rail); it’s private; it’s available on-demand.

In my opinion RTD should investigate PRT, perhaps first using it to connect between rail stations, and then slowly expanding it. An advantage is that a PRT network is a fraction of the cost of a light rail network.

It’s a cool idea, but only time will tell if it succeeds.

I just recently passed the 700 mile mark on my bicycle. It’s been a little over a year since I purchased it; 700 miles a year’s not too bad for a fellow who used to drive everywhere. That’s 20 gallons of gas which I’ve saved!

Now this is truly absurd: a French bus company is suing a bunch of cleaning ladies who carpool to work. Why? Because it’s supposedly unfair competition. This is insane.

Today my dear brother shipped out to parts unknown, doing his duty by God & country as our father, his father, his father and his father have done before him. We’re all extremely proud, and pray daily for his safe return.

Ars Technica examines possible reasons for Apple’s move to Intel. You may be surprised. Hint: Think iPod.

As I’d previously mentioned the concert I went to on the 4th of July at Red Rocks. Honestly, it was a bit of a disappointment. The Motet were fun enough, but they were the openers, and local, and no-one much was paying attention to them: they were just having fun playing a big show. The Wallflowers played a tight set, but the audience didn’t really care, and I think that they must have cut it short—at least, they didn’t play all of their hits. Honestly, if I hadn’t had such a great time when last I saw them then I don’t think I’d ever wish to see them again—it was that sad. They deserved a better audience. Blues Traveler played their two hits, but every other song they played sounded exactly the same. The biggest reaction they got from the audience—which loved them—aside from their hits was when they played cover riffs of famous songs.

On the other hand, it was cool having a good time with my buddies. And there were plenty of hippie chicks to ogle;-)

I went to the Colorado Renascence Festival on Saturday. It’d all the historical accuracy of a visit to Busch Gardens, but it was fun anyway. Mostly this was because I got to debut my Elizabethan clothing and wear my new sword & scabbard (about which more later). I may go again in the future, or may not. It was worth the $16, anyway.

I’ve never thought of it before, but souvenirs serve a very valuable purpose: they remind us of the past in a very concrete way. It’s one thing to know that one’s been to Verdun; it’s another to have a spot of mud on one’s coat therefrom. Likewise, the pint glasses I now own from my recently passed beer tour will stand to remind me of the wonderful time I had these past few days. Someday when I’m an old man and my kids surround me using them to drink juice, I’ll see them and think back to these days.

Which makes me feel for both my parents. There was a time that they were 27; there was a time when the world held limitless opportunities, and when every day was a new adventure. It stopped being that for them a long time ago now, and it’s beginning to cease the same for me, these days. It’s awfully hard to think of my father and mother, my age, holding me in their arms—but they did. It’s even more difficult to think of them as human beings who enjoyed having fun with friends—but they did. Someday, hopefully, I’ll have children who will find me as much of a cypher.

I just got home from the 2005 Austin College Memorial Invitational Beer Tour. Which is to say, I just spent three days with my buddy Darren and two of his buddies from work, Trevor & Justin. On Monday, we saw The Motet, The Wallflowers & Blues Traveler at the 4th of July show (a show about which more in another posting). On Tuesday we left Denver in the morning and drove up to the Pumphouse Brewery & Restaurant for an excellent lunch, then continued on to Ft. Collins to visit the Left Hand/Tabernash Brewery for a tasting, then on to New Belgium for the final tasting of the day. We then grabbed some sandwiches and supplies and headed deep into the Cache la Poudre to camp for the evening. As the resident Eagle Scout, I built the fire (rather well, I think) as well as picked out the evening’s beers (Deschutes Brewery’s Mirror Pond and Twilight Ales) and cigars (Punch Royal Coronation).

It was an absolutely beautiful night, without a cloud or moon in the sky. We saw several shooting stars and satellites as well as the Milky Way (difficult to see nowadays), and had some great fire-fuelled conversation. Didn’t get to bed until about 0130! I should note that I used the same tent that I’ve been camping in for more than half my life, one my folks bought me when I was 10, 11 or 12. It may be in rotten shape, but it still does the trick.

Today we broke camp, then—smelling like well-smoked herring from our campfire—headed back into Ft. Collins for breakfast at McDonald’s (a nice one!) and the went on to tour the Odell Brewing Co., then on to the Trail Ridge Winery, and finally to the Estes Park Brewery for lunch. We then walked about downtown Estes Park for awhile and then journeyed down into Boulder to see Pearl Street and have dinner at the Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery with Trevor’s sister, who is at CU. Finally, we headed back to Denver.

Along the way I picked up:

• 2 bottles Left Hand Imperial Stout
• 2 bottles Left Hand Black Jack Porter
• 1 bottle Left Hand Haystack Wheat
• 1 bottle Tabernash Dunkel Weiss
• 1 Tabernash pint glass
• 1 Left Hand bumper sticker
• a handful of Tabernash temporary tattoos
• 2 bottles New Belgium La Folie
• 2 New Belgium schooner glasses
• 1 stick New Belgium Sunshine Wheat lip balm
• a handful of New Belgium bumper stickers
• 1 Odell 90 Shilling cycling jersey
• 1 Odell Bobby (Kölsch) pint glass
• 1 Odell Levity (amber ale) pint glass
• 1 Odell Isolation Ale poster
• 1 Odell 5 Barrel Pale Ale sticker
• 1 bottle Trail Ridge Cabernet Franc
• 1 bottle Trail Ridge Lemberger
• 2 bottles Estes Park Renegade (India pale ale)
• 1 bottle Estes Park Gold (amber ale)
• 1 bottle Estes Park Samson Stout
• 1 bottle Longs Peak Raspberry Wheat
• 1 bottle Estes Park Barleywine
• 1 Estes Park Brewery pint glass

Why, yes the merchandiser’s eyes did light up when they saw us coming. Why do you ask?

It was a wonderful three days—my only regret is that I must go to work tomorrow.

I hope everyone out there is having a great Fourth of July. Our reasons for the Revolutionary War were not really the best (the fault’s equally on both sides IMHO), but it sure is a good thing that we did revolt and that we are independent. The United States are not the best possible place, but they are the best place so far, and I’m proud to be a citizen of one of them. God Bless the USA!

I’ve just added the Kretchma Cocktail to my list of bachelor recipes. It’s a tasty little treat suitable for serving to ladies of delicate tastes, I think.

Last night while downtown I was passed a $10 bill stamped with info for Where’s George?. This cool website has a single idea: tracking the circulation of money. You simply enter the denomination, series and serial number of the bill along with your zip or postal code, and they display a history of where your money’s been and how quickly it’s travelled from place to place. So I just entered in all the bills in my wallet and hopefully they’ll turn up in another user’s listing sometime. I’ll get an email if and when they do.

I want to get a set of stamps. It’d be really cool to see how far my money goes.

Interestingly, there are similar sites for Canadian money, euros and the like.

From 1976 to 2003, the number of pounds of fireworks sold in the US increased nearly tenfold, and yet the number of fireworks-related deaths remained constant. Every year fifteen times as many children under the age of 10 will drown in their bathtubs as men, women and children will die in fireworks accidents. And yet five states completely outlaw fireworks, and 31 regulate them in some fashion. Celebrate independence; celebrate freedom; celebrate liberty; free fireworks!

Victor Davis Hanson points out one very salient fact: While the world debated whether an American guard at Guantanamo really flushed a Koran down a toilet, Robert Mugabe may have bulldozed the homes of 1.5 million Zimbabweans. Few seem to have cared. The current debate is a succession of tempests in teapots while really important stuff is routinely ignored.

Back in 1960 the Royal Canadian Air Force commissioned the 5BX Plan for Physical Fitness. The idea is that with five basic exercises done a few times weekly one could over time get fit. It’s arranged into a series of six charts, each of which is divided into four grades, each subdivided into three sub-grades. One starts at the very beginning and continues up the chart until one’s at the proper level for one’s age.

I’ve used it in the past, but had slacked off. Once again, though, I’m on the horse. Only up to the level of a seven-year-old boy, but I shan’t stop there.

There’s also a similar plan for women, called the XBX Plan; it uses ten basic exercises. I’m not certain why women have such a different scheme than men, but my guess would be that it has to do with the fact that their bodies are much more delicate than ours: a fellow can get away with a brute-force regimen, but a women needs to use a bit more finesse.

My cousin Anna was in town yesterday, and so I took her to downtown Denver to play some pool, which was fun enough. The problem is how to account for the expenditure. It’s not drinking, even though I’d a half bitter, since drinking wasn’t the point. It’s not eating, even though we’d some food, for the same reason. It’s not entertainment, even though I was entertained, since that is limited to my own entertainment and doesn’t include others’. It’s not skirtchasing, even though she’s a girl, since she’s my cousin. It’s not charity, since charity is giving to causes. It’s not a gift, since I was a benefactor. It wasn’t a household expense, since it wasn’t at home (otherwise it’d have been a good fit).

And those are the only expense accounts which come even close to fitting: it was neither academic expense, nor bad debt, nor sales commission, nor computer, nor insurance, nor medical, nor theft, nor transportation, nor anything really.

This is driving me crazy, to tell the truth. The best I can do is drop it into my personal account, but even that’s not very good, since personal accounts are supposed to cover things I do for myself, not for others. It’s a truly unclassifiable expense. Perhaps I should create a new category: Entertaining Family or something. But would it better fit under personal or household expenses?

I just found a link to freeshell.org, which offers free Unix shell accounts. It sounds very neat, like Unix accounts were in the good old days: large numbers of users online all the time; chatting with your friends; playing games. They also offer email and web space.

Well, for the second year in a row I biked to work on Bike to Work Day. I did see thrice as many cyclists on my route as I normally see (which is to say, I saw three rather than one…), so apparently the effort to get folks out of their cars and onto more humane transportation worked. The upshot of participating in BtWD, of course, is that one can hold oneself as morally superior to those who drive 365 rather than 364 days of the year:-)

Seriously, though, if more folks biked to work the world would no doubt be a better and more pleasant place. The cyclist does a steady pace, while the motorist is constantly accelerating and slowing. The cyclist enjoys the scenery and gets to know the very matter of the road; the motorist speeds through to his destination. Cars, of course, have their place—I wouldn’t trade mine for the world (actually, to be quite honest, I would trade mine in return for title to the Earth), but still there’s something about getting to one’s destination by one’s own power.

After way too much sewing, my Elizabethan slops are complete! Yard upon yard of fabric, thread, pleating and stitching—but it’s all done with now. I hate sewing, but I do love having sewn. Now all I need to finish are my netherstocks and a codpiece to cover the join in the front of my slops, and I’m finished. Well, for now; eventually I need to make sleeves. And a ruff & cuffs. But for now, I’m nearly done…

A month or two ago I started a project to construct a set of Elizabethan clothing, most importantly a doublet (kinda like a vest with sleeves), slops (kind like knee-breeches) and netherstocks (imagine woven knee socks). Well, the doublet is essentially finished and the slops wait only to be stuffed. It’s been a long hard slog, but the end approacheth.

There’s a new site out which explains what the SCA is & is about. It’s pretty attractive.

We’ve all been on sites which offer avatars—that is, small images which represent one. It’s possible to tell a lot about a man from his avatar, and The Buttafly Guide to Friendster Photos tells it like it is.

Me? My avatar is either me drinking a Bass (in a Guinness glass…) or me in my 15th century Italian clothes, depending on the circumstances.

Oh sweet glorious joy of living! I love the world and all that is in it!

You see, there is an alternate way home from work, a way which involves a large hill, and which until today I had not yet attempted to cycle. I had figured that I should be able to hit 35 or 36 mph, and was looking forward to racing down it.

I could not have been prepared for what was to come. I hit the downslope, and switched into my downhill gear, then started ratcheting up, keeping an eye on my speedometer. 24-26-28-30-34-36-yes! But there were still gears to go! 36½-37-37½-38-38½39-39½…could I; would I?…I could and I did: 40 miles per hour! I was going the speed limit; I was going as fast as a car; I was going faster than I had ever gone under my own power; I was one with the road and the wind; I was on top of the world!

It was absolutely incredible, like no other feeling in the world. My next goal: to break the speed limit on that hill…

Meet Dr. Mike Adams a professor at the University of North Carolina. He has devised a manner in which to derive pleasure from leftists: every time a PETA member pesters him, he goes hunting; every time a leftist professor is defeated, he smokes a fine cigar. He even donates shotguns to schools with NRA chapters on campus—and names them after an anti-gun activist.

Curiously, he recommends a Rocky Patel Vintage ’90 as the best cigar he’s ever had (smoked in honour of a professor who called religious folks moral retards stepping down from a position of authority), and the first cigar I grabbed from my humidor this evening was a Rocky Patel ’92.

I was just listening to the Eagles tonight. The DVD of Hell Freezes Over is absolutely incredible. I remember back in college an acquaintance had the CD; it’s nothing compared to the DTS surround-sound experience.

It’s odd to think that it was nearly a decade ago that I first heard Hell Freezes Over. I was much younger, and happier, then.

I’ve just added the Jamaican Black Strap to my bachelor recipes. It’s perfect for the summer.

Interesting, miles per gallon equal furlongs per pint. Which isn’t that surprising, since a furlong is 1/8 mile and a pint is 1/8 gallon. But it’s amusing nonetheless.

My car gets about 35 furlongs to the pint…

Seen on Occidentalis, Bishop Basil on the necessity of monasticism. He often gives this same essay as a sermon.

The New York Daily News thinks that women prefer nerds. I wish that they were correct, but I fear what they have demonstrated is that women like fabulously wealthy guys who are slightly geeky. Hardly the good news one might wish for.

From the Netflix blurb for Jeremiah:

Based on the graphic novels by Hermann Huppen, this sci-fi epic stars Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner as survivors of a deadly virus that, two decades ago, killed everyone but the young. In a world ruled by anarchy and danger, Jeremiah (Perry) is in search of Valhalla, a place that his father told him held hope for the survivors. As a new leader, Jeremiah faces warring groups of survivors who are hoping for peace, but desperate just to live.

Dear Lord, could it possibly be any worse?

…this sci-fi epic stars Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner…

Has-beens…check.

…deadly virus that, two decades ago, killed everyone but the young

Hackneyed post-apocalyptic plot…check. As an aside, if it were two decades ago, then the survivors would hardly be very young now. Which explains, I guess, the casting of Messrs. Perry & Warner.

…Jeremiah…is in search of Valhalla…

Goofiness…check.

As a new leader, Jeremiah faces warring groups of survivors who are hoping for peace, but desperate just to live.

Piss-poor economics and back-story…check. Here’s a hint: very few are ever new leaders; generally it’s a long, hard slog to the top. Also, in situations of limited resources warfare is often the most counter-productive strategy possible. Let me guess—this is one of those post-apocalyptic tales in which everyone has a US Army brigade’s supply of ready-made ammo?

And once again sci-fi fans are left in the lurch. My question is: who thought that this could possibly be good?

del.icio.us (which is a right royal pain to type) is a wonderful little personal-bookmarking/collaborative-tagging application. You create an account and add a few JavaScript scriptlets to your browser toolbar—then use them to bookmark pages you like. Instead of categorising bookmarks in an hierarchical manner, like most bookmark managers, del.icio.us lets you tag them: I can note that my brother’s blog is both a blog and from family.

What is more, you can see other folks’ tagging, and you can manage your own tags; you can even see who else has linked to a page. For example, say I’d like to see all pages categorised as having to do with elephants; I’d merely got to http://del.icio.us/tag/elephant and there they are. Or perhaps I want to see all the folks who’ve tagged this blog: I can go to a list of all entries for my blog.

Oh—and anyone can see my bookmarks by going to http://del.icio.us/eadmund. How cool is that?

What’s best, of course, is that it’s free.

Years ago in school I was introduced to Lisp; my opinion was not very favourable. It appeared to be a goofy theoretical language, useful for exploring functional programming and maybe for AI work, but not for solving real-world problems. I don’t believe that I’m alone in having gotten that impression; for some reason all too many college CS programmes focus on teaching C and Java.

Be that as it may, I had the sneaking suspicion that Lisp might actually be far more practical than it had appeared. Folks like esr wrote that Lisp is worth learning for a different reason—the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; Paul Graham wrote many articles detailing, among other things, how Lisp was a competitive for his successful startup; Phil Greenspun expounded the famous Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp. And so I began to wonder what I’d missed.

Then Slashdot published a review of Practical Common Lisp, which I then bought. It was as though a door had opened in a hitherto-impenetrable wall! Seibel’s superlative work showed how Common Lisp could be used usefully.

So, what is Lisp? Well, it’s a functional language. And an imperative one. And an object-oriented one. It’s interpreted. And compiled. It’s dynamically extendable: the programmer has full access to the entire language when programs are read in, when they’re compiled and when they’re run. He can create new syntax; he can replace standard syntax. He can connect to a running application and modify it, correcting bugs as he goes.

CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, is amazingly powerful. Rather than having methods tied to a single class, as with most object systems, methods are specialised on one or more classes—and they can be added after the class has been defined. This means that any programmer can easily and seamlessly extend a built-in class. Want to add regexp matching to strings? Then do it—there are no hoops to jump through.

Quite frankly, Common Lisp is an incredible language which has spent far too long in the background. So, of course, I’m rewriting my tasting notes app in it to see how it works. So far, it’s really cool.

Well, the big news today is that Apple Computer have decided to switch from PowerPC to x86 for their CPUs. Quite frankly, this makes no sense to me, for I cannot see an advantage and yet can see many disadvantages.

I used to be a very big Macintosh fan years ago; in fact, nearly all of my college friends now use Macs. Eventually, though, I realised first of all that not all command lines are created equal (see Unix); that freedom trumps other concerns (see GNU/Linux); and that Apple has lost its once-vaunted user interface skills (see OS X). I had, however, been considering the purchase of an iBook in order to get some nifty Linux hardware.

That’s part of why this is so confusing. The x86 is an ugly architecture. Why switch to it? It has much less room for growth than PowerPC.

Don’t Apple realise that no-one will buy a Mac for the next two years? This announcement end-of-lifes all their hardware in one fell swoop.

I predict that this will cause yet another wave of Mac developers to quit the fold; this is one change too many. First 68K->PowerPC, then Classic->OS X, and now this: it’s clear that an investment in apple technology is building on ever-shifting sand.

Lastly, I don’t care what sort of hardware goofiness Apple get up to: within a matter of months after the release of x86 Mac OS X, it will be possible to run it on Windows and/or Linux. If it’s on the same architecture, it’s easy to emulate whatever hardware DRM they care to implement.

So Apple is giving up a technical advantage, drastically cutting revenue, losing developers and losing its platform dominance. Why, again?

This is turning into a recap of the NeXT saga…

Today I participated in my first-ever organised shooting event, the Aurora Gun Club’s D-Day Memorial Shoot, in which the only guns used are those of WWII vintage. What, when did Bob start collecting guns? you might ask yourself. Actually, I’ve not: my good buddy Martin (who’s on the Board of Directors of the club) invited me, lent me an Enfield and gave me the 35 rounds of British .303 I shot.

It was a lot of fun. The course of fire was 5 practise rounds, then 10 rounds prone (that’s lying down, for those of you unfamiliar with the lingo) in 10 minutes, then 10 rounds prone in 80 seconds, then ten rounds either kneeling or sitting in 10 minutes (I opted for sitting). The Enfield is a wonderful weapon to shoot, with a nice bolt action. The rounds do have a slight tendency to get a bit stuck loading, but that's relatively easily fixed. I wonder if the rounds I was using are not the same form factor the originals used—indeed, they almost certainly are, since I’m pretty sure that jacketed hollow point ammunition is illegal to use for warfare.

I didn’t shoot very well, but then I’m no marksman. Still, I didn’t do too badly, all things considered, and of course it’s just a fun shoot.

One of the cool things was that a fellow brought three WWII-era machine guns for a demonstration shoot: two American guns (an M2 and something whose name I forget) and a German (a MG23 or MG43?). I’d never seen a machine gun used, and it’s very cool. They do eat ammunition very quickly: in a matter of seconds he had spent over $100. But man are they cool! I didn’t know this, but each weapon makes quite a distinct sound; IMHO it’d be very easy to distinguish them on a battlefield.

It wasn’t a completely perfect day, for someone had ordered authentic weather: cold and rainy. It was so wet that we were all soaked through-and-through by the end, and so cold (beyond chilly) that when Martin & retired indoors to finish scoring that our hands could barely write. But it was all fun anyway, and of course it really just helped add some atmosphere. I gotta say that the last relay rather hurried through their final set, though: one would swear that it’d been a speed-fire event…

Afterwards we’d a raffle and door prizes: I got a free hour at K2 Firearms Training Centre as well as a beer cosy shaped like a T-shirt. And I got my Civilian Marksmanship Program certificate, so now I’m eligible to purchase old surplus guns at a nominal cost. All in all a very fun day!

My sister-in-law Emily was in town this weekend for Stephen’s Eagle ceremony, lots of pictures for my Mom and (of course) to see her husband, my brother (they’d not seen one another since March). I always enjoy spending time with her, but this time it occurred to me that we’ve not spent three days’ worth of time together: in many ways she’s really a stranger. I like her, of course—but it’s a kind of associative liking through Thomas, in the same manner that one likes one’s buddy’s friends because, even though they are unknown to one, they must be cool if one’s friend likes them.

I have every expectation that if we did know one another well that we’d get along famously, and indeed when our paths have cross such has been the case. But it’d be so great if Tom & Em were here in Denver and we had dinner or drinks at least once a month.

For that matter, I hardly know my own brother; it’s been almost a decade since we’ve spent a great deal of time with one another. We’re family, of course, and that means that I don’t feel like a left-behind childhood friend or anything like that—but we each are that in a small way to each other. We grew up together once, but we no longer do.

Of course, no-one can know what the future might bring. Thomas & Emily might end up in Colorado; for that matter, I might end up in California. And of course there are my other two brothers to consider. All in all, the odds of the four of us living in the same state again are pretty slim.

Johnny Lechner has been in college for 11 years. His grades are good; he just sees no reason to graduate. In response, the regents of his university have doubled his tuition. Why? He’s not hurting anyone; he’s paying his own way; he’s certainly improving his mind. And he’s having the time of his life. I envy the man.

Today was my very last day on the CoBank account. Tomorrow marks five years to the day since I started there, fresh out of college. I’ve spent my entire career there, and now it’s gone.

In retrospect, I shouldn’ve have taken the position there, but should have found a job in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area of Texas. I came to Denver because I had a mentor here and figured that I’d meet new people and make new friends, but in less than a year he was gone, and the expected friendships failed to blossom. So I was left mentorless and friendless. Hindsight is 20/20.

On Saturday my youngest brother was awarded the rank of Eagle Scout, bringing the total in our family to four. We’re all very proud of him. He’s now an assistant Scoutmaster and is currently down at Philmont Scout Ranch, down in Cimmaron, New Mexico.

My folks threw a party, of course, which was a lot of fun. Setting up ahead of time I realised once again how cool it is to have brothers (and how much I pity those without them). There’s something wonderful about being related to such fine young men.

For the ultimate in roughing it, La Petite Maison du Weekend. Those crazy French-Canadians!

Well, today I was up in Boulder for what may be the last time. The account on which I’ve spent my entire professional life is going away, and I had to pull down their DR space. It was very sad to see those boxes—some of which have been there longer than me—powered down, disconnected and made ready for the movers. Sigh.

I’m really going to miss going up there.

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ADVISORY: There is an Extremely Remote Chance That, Through a Process Known as Tunnelling, This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present Location and Reappear at Any Other Place in the Universe, Including Your Neighbour’s Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damage or Inconvenience That May Result.

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Well, Saturday was by far the absolute worst birthday I’ve ever had, with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Not a single one. I should have just stayed in bed. What a thoroughly rotten, miserable, unpleasant day.

Today marks twenty-seven years since my birth. I will never be twenty-six again; I will never again be in my early late twenties.

When one’s a kid, a birthday is a wonderful thing, for it brings both presents and increased privileges. At ten we could leave our street on our own; at thirteen one could see a PG-13 film; at sixteen drive (and back in those days, a teenage driver’s license was real, not like it is now); at seventeen get into a R-rated film; at eighteen be a legal adult (and hence purchase firearms); at twenty-one drink; at twenty-five rent a car. But once the twenty-fifth birthday has past, there’s nothing good about birthdays. When one’s an adult, there are no presents worth getting (because if one wanted something, one would have bought it). When one’s older, each birthday is a chance to mark all the ways in which one has aged in the past year.

My joints creak; my knees pop when I cycle; my hair is turning grey; I had a hernia operation last year and will carry an accurséd appliance within me for the rest of my life. I’m not even thirty and I’m falling apart and having to replace my failing parts!

When one’s a kid, each year brings the promise of improvement: a deeper voice; hair on one’s chin; another inch of height; a stronger grip. I have to face the reality that I’m past my prime (it was probably somewhere about 24–25); it’s all a long downhill slide from here, as my skin loses its suppleness, my muscles are sapped of their strength, my bones turn brittle, my sight fails, my hearing wanes, my digestion weakens and eventually my organs—and thus I myself—give up the ghost.

Birthdays—don’t talk to me about birthdays.

I went to see the latest (and last?) Star Wars film yesterday with my kid brother. Going in, I had exceedingly low expectations: the last two prequels have gone beyond bad, exploring hitherto unplumbed depths of poor film-making.

It was really quite good: finally, an actual Star Wars movie. No, it’s not the greatest film ever made—but it’s quite good. Well worth seeing.

Today marks five years since that black day on which I strode across the stage in front of the Administration Building at Austin College, received my diploma and left all my friends and happiness behind to become a wage slave. It hasn’t all been bleak, of course, but it hasn’t been exactly great, or even particularly decent.

Life as an adult is sad & lonely, the days consisting of working to buy food and eating to be able to work. School was much more enjoyable. Of course, what’s really sad is that compared to almost everyone who’s ever lived, my life is pretty good.

One of the local radio stations has been doing what it calls a rewind this last week: they’re playing everything they’ve ever played in chronological order. It’s really quite cool, and has drilled home one over-riding point: modern music is rubbish.

The last half of the 1990s featured an amazing variety of popular (at the time termed alternative) music, and a good deal of musical ability therein. Even the pieces which I don’t care for are good—just not my thing. In contrast, modern music is for the most part a worthless sameness of poor writing, poor singing and poor playing. Then we had the Wallflowers’ One Headlight; we had Rammstein’s Du Hast; we had the heyday of Cake; we had Prodigy; we had Fiona Apple; we had the Cowboy Junkies, the Sneaker Pimps, Blur and so on. What do we have now? Ten thousand variants of that most worthless of musical forms, rap.

Something else which occurred to me is how utterly absurd—and yet at the same time utterly cool—the swing music phenomenon was. I mean, we’re talking about a bastardised jazz/big band/what-have-you thing. But it worked, and it worked well. Tell me you can’t hear Zoot Suit Riot without wanting to get up and dance. Tell me that the Squirrel Nut Zippers didn’t put out some great tunes.

Sure, I realise that some of my fondness for the music is due to the fact that from 1996–2000 I was in college. No doubt I’ve rose-coloured glasses to a certain extent. But even taking that into account, the music of the late ’90s was far, far, far than the pap played now.

Muffy Mead-Ferro doesn’t take her kids to toddler ærobics; she doesn’t ferry them about hither & yon; instead, she lets them amuse themselves outdoors. A smart-sounding woman.

I wouldn’t say that my own mother was a slacker (especially not within earshot!), and I know that both of my parents spent a truly incredible amount of time and resources on us, but I think that compared to some of the hyper-twit parents one finds nowadays that they lean more towards this woman’s end of the scale. Certainly, they let us play on our own outside, and assigned us chores, and weren’t afraid to hire a babysitter and get out of the house when they needed it. For that matter, I doubt that Mrs. Mead-Ferro spends little time with her kids, rather than a sane amount of time.

Her book might be interesting, although since I’m a guy it’s probably better to avoid it: methinks that no woman on earth would appreciate me having read it.

In the vicinity of Heroes or Evil Overlords, or plan to be in the future? Well, be sure to check out The Innocent Bystander's Survival Guide.

A survey of the scientific literature reveals that men & women think differently. Different parts of our brains are more developed; we produce different concentrations of hormones in response to various stimuli; we even remember the same situations differently. In other news, scientists have noted that the sky is often azure and that apples generally fall to the ground…

Henry Higgins wondered why can’t a woman be more like a man; now we know the answer: they’re not built the same.

That’s the license plate of the car which nearly sideswiped me this afternoon at lunchtime. I called the cops to register a complaint, and they have undertaken to educate the driver about the requirements of the law.

Should I be smashed up in a hit-and-run, one could do worse than to check that car for bits of blood and hair.

Christ is risen! Truly He is Risen!

Christus ist auferstanden! Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden!

Cristo Resucitado! En Verdad Resucitado!

Crist aras! Soðlice he aras!

Crist is arisen! Arisen he sothe!

Christos Anesti! Alithos Anesti!

Χριστος Ανεστι! Αλιθος Ανεστι!

Christus Surrexit! Vere Surrexit!

Christos Voskrese! Voistinu Voskrese!

I drove home from church singing the Paschal Anthem (Christ is risen from the dead/trampling down death by death/and upon those in the tombs/bestowing life), my heart overjoyed to celebrate the Feasts of Feasts, the Resurrection of Our Lord. I finished my post-Lenten dinner (rib-eye rubbed with Montana steak seasoning and garlic olive oil; corn on the cob with butter, salt & pepper; hot potato with butter, salt, pepper & green onions; and an excellent Belgian-style ale from New York), and my stomach is overjoyed to be filled with meat once again. I consider the magnitude of what Christ won for us, and my mind is overjoyed to know that death is conquered once and for all.

I’m trying not to think about the fact that I need to read the Epistle at the 0800 service this morning…

I found an excellent article by Beth Hawkins about over-protective parents. I’ve gotta say that I’m glad that my parents weren’t like some of those in the article. Sure, they’d some rules which were a bit over-the-top (the ones about leaving the street before one’s 10th birthday, and about going near the lake are about the only ones I remember now), but for the most part they let us play like normal kids. I remember going for picnics in Jamestown and Williamsburg, exploring creeks and marshes with my brothers, getting horribly dirty and having loads of fun—and as I remember it they mostly trusted that we couldn’t get into too much trouble on our own. And we didn’t.

Sure, accidents happen. But they’re very rare. And might it not be worse to produce a stilted human being never capable of fully maturing than to take the slight risk of allowing some harm to befall?

Who knew that the Dark Lord of the Sith has a blog? It features such bits as And Me, with a Pain in All the Diodes Down my Left Side and My Sinister Agents Have Failed Me Again. Hugely worth reading.

Today is apparently Take Your Anklebiter to Work Day. I’m not certain what exactly the point is: a chance to suck the very life from the sprog, just like it’s drained from their parents; an opportunity to curtain climbers that adult life isn’t as fun as they think; a head-start on embittering the little spawn?

Don’t get me wrong: I like kids and would someday like to have a set of my own. I also like a good bath, but I don’t bring my tub into work. It’s the soul of selfishness to assume that just because one has copulated successfully, the rest of us want to be tripping over one’s get all day.

There’s a time and a place for everyone and everything: the place for yard apes is not work but, oddly enough, the yard.

As Easter approaches, I thought I’d post an article by the learnéd Cædmon Parsons which I found on a mailing list I frequent:

Most of us may well prefer to use the word Pascha for Feast of the Lord’s Resurrection but, please, let us not be so uncouth as to attack the venerable word Easter which is a part of our Orthodox heritage and a genuine survival from the days when Britain was Orthodox in her faith.

There is absolutely no evidence for a Germanic goddess with a name in any way resembling the word Easter. Rather than the term being derived from a goddess, the supposed goddess is derived from the term. She was postulated by certain 19th century Germanic scholars in an attempt to explain the etymology of the word. These same scholars (foremost among them the Grimm brothers, famous for their folk-tale collections and less well-known as the discoverers of the Indo-European linguistic family) had a very definite nationalist/ethnic agenda in which they were trying to rediscover the real roots of German culture. Thus the folk-tale collection’s avowed purpose was to search for survivals of pre-Christian Germanic religion and culture.

The later connection of this invented figure to Astarte was sheer fundamentalist propaganda based on a coincidental similarity in sound. Having dismissed Nativity/Christmas because its timing coincides with a number of pagan solar festivals, those fundamentalist groups which criticise all celebration of holy days thereby sought to discredit Easter whose general timing is well laid out in the Bible. If there was a connection, it would be the only case of a Sumerian/Canaanite word coming into the Germanic languages without first passing through Hebrew and/or Greek into Latin and then into Germanic via the medium of Christianity.

There is some by no means conclusive evidence of a festival or holy day connected to the spring solstice. However, every recorded instance of the word’s usage has clear Christian connotations (i.e., if it ever was a pagan festival, it had effectively disappeared by the time people wrote using the term Easter). As to why this word is used in English and German: it is used in German for the simple reason that the pagans of modern-day Germany were missionised by Anglo-Saxon Christians such as St. Willibrord or the two St. Hewalds. The Germans thus got Easter the same way the Russians got Pascha—from those who evangelised them.

Although the Grimm Brothers probably did conflate the issue, the goddess Eostre may be a valid concept. However, the only mention of a goddess Eostre is recorded in Bede’s 8th century De tempore Ratione (On the Reckoning of Time)—the book which helped popularise BC/AD dating. Since there is no other corroborating evidence Bede may be mistaken. However the term for Pascha was not named from this doubtful Goddess. Instead it is most likely that Easter (Pascha) comes from the Saxon month of Eostre (April) which was used for the spring period.

In other words, the term Easter no more honours Eostre than a Wednesday Night Service at your local Protestant church honours Odin (Wednesday = Woden’s Day).

In England itself, this is the type of theoretical issue Anglo-Saxonists enjoy arguing. There appears to have been a very strong cultural bias among the Anglo-Saxons against other languages. While their Latin missionaries and then their own churchmen obviously knew and used Latin, there was remarkably little borrowing from Latin into English at this time. In almost every instance, the English Church took existing English words to express ecclesiastical terms (thus sanctus was translated by hælig [holy, healthy, whole] and Old English uses hælige John not St. John, hæliged [hallowed] rather than sanctified, &c) rather than simply borrowing the Latin (the modern preponderance of Latin loan words for ecclesiastical terms is a product of the post 1066 Norman invasion). In addition to Latin books, Old English had the most active vernacular literature (primarily Christian) of any Western area prior to the millennium. There is an extant translation of the gospel of John which is the oldest translation of the Bible into a western vernacular with the exception of Bishop Wulfilas’s Arian translations into Gothic (itself another Germanic language).

In other words, the presence of the word Easter is actually a product of the vibrant Orthodoxy of the Anglo-Saxon Church which unlike later periods did not suppress the resident culture in favour of an all-embracing Latinism but rather transformed (in accord with the guidelines given to St. Augustine of Canterbury by St. Gregory the Great) the entire language and culture. Although I myself generally use Pascha because it is the common usage among Orthodox now, I find attempts to dismiss as pagan a true survival of English Orthodoxy very problematic.

Furthermore, there does not seem to be any English form of the word Pascha; Orthodox England never called the feast anything but Easter.

Word-list (from J.R. Clarke-Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary)

east

adj. east, easterly

adv. eastwards, in an easterly direction, in or from the east

eastan

from the east, easterly

eastanwind

east wind

eastcyning

eastern king

eastdæl

eastern quarter, the East

easte

the East

eastende

east-end, east quarter

Eastengle

the East Anglians: East Anglia

Easteræfen

Easter-eve

Easterdæg

Easter-day, Easter Sunday

Easterfæstan

Easter-fast, Lent

Easterfeorm

feast of Easter

Easterfreolsdæg

the feast day of Passover

Eastergewuna

Easter custom (appears only in the 9th century sermons of Ælfric where he is reffering to Christian Easter practises)

Easterlic

belonging to Easter, Paschal

Eastermonath

Easter-month, April

Easterne

east, eastern, oriental

Easterniht

Easter-night

Eastersunnandæg

Easter Sunday

Eastersymble

Passover (lit. Easter gathering)

Eastertid

Eastertide, Paschal season

Easterthenung

Passover

Easterwucu

Easter Week

Eastre

Easter, Passover, (possibly) Spring.

And while I find the etymological connection of Easter and astiehen (to rise up) doubtful, the pun of Eastre, astah (risen) is very obvious in Anglo-Saxon.

So you see there’s nought wrong with saying Happy Easter!

I didn’t know this, but in 1998 a Texan swam from Cape Cod to France. That’s a truly amazing trip, one which took 72 days to complete. Someday I’d like to walk across America, which isn’t quite so cool, but would still be pretty neat.

From the Wikipaedia page on the titles of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, this one woman is most fully (and alphabetically) known as:

Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Antigua and Barbuda, of Australia, of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, of Barbados, of Belize, of Canada, of Grenada, of Jamaica, of New Zealand, of Papua New Guinea, of Saint Christopher and Nevis, of Saint Lucia, of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, of the Solomon Islands, of Tuvalu, and of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Queen, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith.

The list of her orders and honours is even longer. It must be nice. I really wish that the US had an honours system: it’d give one something to aim for. To tell the truth, I’d trade everything I own—down to the last empty beer bottle—for an hereditary peerage. And I7rsquo;d give the majority of my life’s fortune for membership in even a single order. Sigh…

I recently found an excellent article on the harm done by the minimum wage. The author—who manages rest stops and camping grounds—hires old folks who mostly are content to work for free camping and a few bucks to cover gas for their RVs. They do a good job and are generally conscientious. It’s exactly the sort of situation which economists mean when they say that people are willing to trade some benefits for others. If the minimum wage is increased, then he will have several bad options: eliminate the jobs; contract out the jobs; automate the jobs; raise prices. None of these are good.

There should be no legislated minimum wage: the minimum wage is the least anyone is willing to work for. That’s fair. It sounds bad, but remember that there’s competition for labour: if someone needs hired help, he’ll pay more than the prevailing wage in order to get more employees. We can see this now: almost no-one is paid minimum wage. Fast food joints are now paying almost twice what the law requires, and they’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they need to. Adam Smith’s invisible hand wins again.

The odometer on my bike passed the 600 mile mark today. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to cross the English Channel at its widest point four times over; it’s 2/3 of the way from Denver, Colo. to Dallas, Tx.; it’s 20 times the width of Rhode Island & Providence Plantations and 15 times its length. Granted, I know of people who put that much on their cars in a week—but every single one of those miles was covered by my legs, which is pretty cool.

Well, the Romans have a new bishop, and the Roman Church has a new pope: Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger. From what very little I know of him, he’s a decent fellow of the old mold. I’ve no idea what his relations with our churches will be. It’s probably not too likely that he’ll decide to renounce infallibility…

From Playskool comes Darth Tater: Mr. Potato Head dressed to look like Darth Vader. It’s actually really amusing.

Bungie (now a subsidiary of Microsoft) have just released the Marathon Trilogy. For those who’ve not heard of it, Marathon came out at about the same time as Doom did for PCs. Despite being roughly contemporaneous, Marathon was much more advanced: while on only aimed horizontally in Doom, Marathon supported full horizontal and vertical aiming; while the PC game was very two-dimensional (with just the illusion of 3D), the Mac standard was fully (albeit primitively) three-dimensional; but most importantly where Doom had no story other than kill lots of things before they kill you, Marathon had a complex story of aliens and an insane computer who was both ally and foe.

Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity carried on that tradition of excellent stories, with perhaps the best storylines of any first-person-shooter I’ve ever played, stories almost good enough for interactive fiction. Indeed, the Marathon series were a kind of interactive fiction with a shoot-em-up component.

Although now long-outdated, the source for Marathon Infinity was released years ago by Bungie and has now given birth to Marathon: Aleph One, with which it is possible to play the latter two of the original trilogy, but with better sounds and graphics. Marathon lives on!

Nowadays it is taken as a given that the best way to deal with problems is to talk about them. It ain’t necessarily so; indeed for some people it can be harmful. I have known this for years, of course, but no-one asked me.

I recently re-found a link to this superb set of men’s clothing from the Elizabethan period. I would love to own this, and would wear it whenever opportunity presented itself. Modern clothing is so…drab.

In the Battle of Tarawa in 1943, the USMC conquered a series of Pacific islets. 3,000 Marines fell; out of 4,700 Japanese only 17 survived. It’s impossible to imagine a survival rate of 1/3 of one percent. Said one of those survivors, when asked if Japanese morale ever broke, Yes, when the dieing Marines kept coming and coming.

We complain about less than 2,000 dead in Iraq in two years or so—half again as many died in a single battle for a single string of islets nowhere in the Pacific.

My parents called to remind me that today is the Feast of St. Guthlac of Crowland (or Croyland). A young man of noble birth (and brother to another saint, a hermitess named St. Pege, or Pega), he became a Benedictine monk and later a hermit in the fens of Crowland. He drained them, wrestled with the demons who lived there, and finally was victorious, turning the swamps into beautiful and fertile land, as related in the excellent Life of St. Guthlac related by the esteemed, and late, Prof. Raymond P. Tripp, Jr. in the April 2001 Lion. Because of his life, he has been associated with Orthodox Ecology.

For my own part, I took his name when re-enacting Anglo-Saxon times because I felt sorry for the old fellow. A saint should be honoured by the naming of children for him, and his example should be something which others are called to follow—but no-one will name his child Guthlac, and very few will hear his story and be inspired by his example. Well, this is one small way to honour him and to perhaps influence other to in some small way follow his example.

The Troparion & Kontakion of St. Guthlac:

Father Guthlac you followed the ways of the prophet Elijah,
and the straight path of the Forerunner.
You became a dweller in the cisterns of Croyland
and in that wilderness brought forth fruit an hundredfold both conquering the demons and healing the sick.
Intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

You abandoned royal estates and the life of a warrior to live by silence and prayer,
by this you inspired the English peoples, holy Father Guthlac.
Wherefore we acclaim you
as the father of English monasticism.

The lesson we learn from St. Guthlac’s example is two-fold: first, the holiness of monasticism; second, the holiness of reclaiming this fallen Earth for man’s goodly use. On the one hand, it is worthy to forsake the world and seek God alone; on the other, it is worthy to strive to tame the wild, to dispel sickness, and to bend uncouth nature to the service of man.

The romantic Germans have come up with Singles Shopping: show up at Wal-Mart at a designated time and receive a bright bow to tie to your cart—and then cruise the store, maybe meeting the girl of your dreams. Interesting little idea.

A little-known fact is that George S. Patton, the hero of the Second World War, was at one point in time Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School for the Fifteenth Cavalry. He even wrote a manual on the use of the sword and designed the M1913 cavalry sabre.

I’ve yet to see her in any films, but Emmy Rossum appears to be a true beauty. I first noticed this in a photo comparing her outfit to an Austrian empress; my suspicion was confirmed in a photo of her at a screening or somesuch event. A truly attractive girl, and if she graces the movie camera quite so well as she does the still, then she’ll certainly go places.

Time, in an article about the lying-in-state of Pope John Paul II, writes the traditional pageantry, mystery and power of Vatican rituals has[sic] awed the faithful for centuries. Not has; have. The subject is plural: pageantry, mystery and power. We live in a sad age indeed.

I want fifteen minutes in a room with the guy who invented daylight savings time. Me, him and an aluminium baseball bat. Wham!

I noticed that the new Louisiana Purchase Nickel has a pipe on the back, crossed with a tomahawk above a handshake. Just sayin’…

Nat Hentoff—an (intelligent) atheist—writes on the Schiavo affair. His conclusion? We don’t execute murder-rapists in so grotesque a fashion, and yet we consign an innocent woman to a horrible death on no greater evidence than that of a suspect husband and his siblings.

Deroy Murdock aptly demonstrates that objectors to the murder of Terri Schiavo need not be religious. The simple fact of the matter is that a retarded woman is being murdered: no man of conscience—Christian, Jewish, deist, agnostic or atheist—can countenance that.

Fortunately, he was able to alert folks as to what happened.

David Boaz has an excellent solution to the marriage debate: privatise it! He writes:

Marriage is an important institution. The modern mistake is to think that important things must be planned, sponsored, reviewed, or licensed by the government. The two sides in the debate over gay marriage share an assumption that is essentially collectivist. Instead of accepting either view, let’s get the government out of marriage and allow individuals to make their own marriage contracts, as befits a secular, individualist republic at the dawn of the information age.

Written in ’97, it’s no less true today.

A eight-character password is hardly sufficient to protect your data; a multi-word passphrase is necessary. But how should one be chosen? Diceware Passphrases are chosen completely randomly using a large list of English words (I would recommend adding a nonsense word in the middle of the phrase in order to confuse anyone knows that you use the system). Of course, a complete security plan encompasses more than just passphrases and includes such issues as physical security—but every little bit helps.

As just about everyone in the civilised world knows, a woman named Terri Schiavo lies dying in a Florida hospital. Is she dying of organ failure? No. Is she brain-dead? No. What, then, is killing her? The answer is that she’s being starved to death.

The reason given is that her husband claims that such was her wish were she ever in a so-called persistent vegetative state. Of course, he’s hardly a reliable witness, given that he stands to gain both financially and personally upon her death (he has had two children by another woman, with whom he has been living for many years.

There’s disagreement on whether or not she’s actually in such a PVS: the major witness testifying to that effect is a man who advocates starvation of those with Alzheimer’s, who hasn’t spent even an hour with her or ordered even the most basic scans necessary to diagnose such a condition (and which diagnosis is necessarily incorrect more than 40% of the time anyway).

Is she dead? No. Is she brain-dead? No. Is she on life support (as conventionally understood)? No. She’s just a brain-damaged woman who cannot feed herself. As infants, none of us could feed ourselves, nor did we show much evidence of intelligence either. Granted, our prognosis was better—but there are physicians who believe that Mrs. Schiavo could recover a significant amount of cognitive ability.

The whole thing stinks. If she were brain-dead, then the only argument would be over whether or not she should be dismembered and her organs used in others. But she’s not: her brain, while severely damaged, continues to work. Were she on life support (i.e., having her lung and heart operated by machine), then at least the argument could be made that many consider that a kind of heroic measure. But she’s not: all she has is a simple little feeding tube. Yes, she’s retarded. Since when did that merit being tortured to death by starvation?

The whole mess is despicable. An innocent woman is dying an agonising death and the great mass of people simply don’t care.

Colby College hosts weekly events where students can learn about beer and wine. I think that this is an excellent idea. In moderation, alcohol is pleasant; it is healthy; it is tasty; it is good (witness the fact that Our Lord made the stuff). Abused, it’s a rotten thing indeed.

Events like these introduce students to what drinking can be; witness the comment of one girl, I always thought I hated wine. But now I realize that what I hated were the $3 bottles of wine I bought at the grocery store. Now that she’s seen what the good stuff is like, she’s much less likely to go out and buy a $3 bottle to get drunk—and one simply doesn’t have enough cash to get smashed every night on $20 bottles. So the quantity of her drinking will no doubt decrease and the quality increase. This is a Good Thing.

In his article MTV Smut Peddlers: Targeting Kids with Sex, Drugs and Alcohol, Casey Williams writes, It has been a year since Janet Jackson deliberately exposed her breast to a world-wide audience that included millions of unsuspecting children during the MTV-produced 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. This quote to me reveals the utter lunacy of some of my friends on the cultural conservative side of things (I count myself firmly in that number): how many tens of millions of times is the female breast exposed to children every day in the act of breast-feeding? It’s not the exposure which is offensive (indeed, I can’t see that there is much wrong with non-sexual nudity in general), but rather the context. The infant who suckles at his mother’s breast is not harmed; the child who sees a couple hooking up is.

Later Mr. Williams writes, Parents witnessed first-hand the incessant crotch-grabbing and revealing clothing, the dangerous mixture of aggression and sexuality, and the relentless sexual simulation and stimulation that characterise MTV's programming. That’s the real problem. It’s not whether or not a very particular body part is shown; it’s the context in which it is shown. There is nothing at all sexual about Kathy Bates; there’s a great deal attractive about Amanda Peet. Likewise, it’s not the breast per se but the crotch-grabbing, the freaking, the degradation of man and woman &c. which are so offensive.

Sex and sexuality are good things in their place; so too are violence and aggression (if you disagree, try fighting a tiger or wolf without them…)—it’s their misuse and misdirection which is so distressing. The current culture, though, twists good things to perverse ends. As Exhibit A, I present hip-hop. Now, music and dancing have always been ways for young men and young women to attract one another. This is the nature of things. But recently we have seen a new phenomenon. If the waltz, big band and doo-wop (and, in fact, every previous form of music) were music for making love, rock-and-roll was music for having sex (the name itself came from a euphemism therefor…); and now we have hip-hop, music for rutting like beasts. Where the older forms at least paid lip-service to love, rock & roll was all about lust—but hip-hop isn’t even about that: lust at least has an object, while hip-hop is all about the self. In its milieu others exist solely to satisfy one’s base needs, not to spur one onto higher things.

As Exhibit B, I present hip-hop (it’s bad enough to require double-treatment). Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, certainly: sweet and proper it is to die (and by extension, kill) for one’s country. But where older sentiments extolled violence as a means to good ends, semi-recent culture loved it as a thing unto itself, and hip-hop extols cruelty as an end. There are beasts which kill for sport (cats leap to mind), true, but they are few and far between, and until recently we despised them for it. The rap culture is about barbarity and cruelty not for defence of wife & children; not for love of country; not even for prevention of worse evil—but for love of barbarism.

I understand that the Greeks developed a philosophical system in which every vice was considered a perverted virtue: lust is perverted love; pride is perverted pleasure in doing a proper job; greed is perverted self-preservation and so on (there are better names for the Græco-Roman virtues, but I cannot remember them). The problem with the modern world is that we elevate the vices into virtues. In our age lust is laudable; pride is something to be proud of; greed is good.

If rock and roll reduced men to the level of their feelings (not that feelings in themselves are bad), modern music (if that term can even be applied to a mish-mash of tones, without logic, form or reason) reduces men to the level of the animals. But at least the beasts of the field have an excuse: they were not created for any great destiny or purpose. But we were made in the image and likeness of God, made to worship and become like unto Him—and our perversion of His visage is foul indeed.

Victor Hanson examines Ward Churchill, Colorado’s most embarrassing professor today.

On 6 May 1945, the newly-liberated Orthodox prisoners of Dachau celebrated Christ’s resurrection. They made their vestments from hospital towels and Red Cross emblems; they used a spare Catholic prayer room for their chapel; they recited the services from memory—but once again Christ’s Church triumphed over evil.

From Cleolinda, Troy in Fifteen Minutes. Very, very, very funny.

Æons ago C.S. Lewis wrote the wonderful Chronicles of Narnia: fantastic adventure fiction for children. They’re really quite good and, as is typical of English children’s fiction of the time, enjoyable for adults as well. They are also not shy about the realities of life: Peter must clean his sword of a foe’s blood, lest it stick in its sheath; Eustace gets hungover from mead and so on.

My mother has a nice set; my brother Thomas has a nice set; someday I should like a nice leather-bound edition of the Chronicle of Narnia, preferably with the illustrations (all of them) by Pauline Baines. Something to Google about for—perhaps I can find something on Amazon or somesuch.

I’ve discovered an interesting article on meat pickled in mead vinegar. I’ve made wine and beer (malt) vinegars, but mead is so expensive to make that it’s hard to justify the expense.

Tonight in honour of St. Patrick I drink a single malt scotch. Why a scotch? Because it is produced by that bunch of Celts who didn’t rebel against their rightful king in wartime in this century (the Scots did side with Parliament against King Charles I, but that was awhile ago); who aren’t responsible for the longest-running terror campaign in history; and who don’t disembowel men who disagree with them in public (again, this is recently…). Also, scotch is much superior to Irish whiskey.

And the Scots get to wear kilts. The kilt is not an Irish garment in any sense of the word—and yet in the past few decades the idea of an Irish kilt has arisen, which wouldn’t be so objectionable were it honest: it’s something new, not something ancient.

Also, the Irish are responsible for more whey-faced Celtic New Age goofy-music than any ethnic group on earth.

I will grant that their girls are pretty and their landscapes equally so.

Almost 43 years ago the first excerpts of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; nearly 3 years ago Ronald Bailey noted the harmful effects that her book has had.

Jonah Goldberg points out the pressing feline menace. Apparently feral cats are a major predator of rare bird species, and in response Wisconsin is proposing that they be hunted. Now I’ll admit that I’m a life-long cat-hater, but the idea of hunting cats seems so eminently sensible. After all, the big cats hunt us.

Ever wondered what a cartoon character’s skeleton looks like? Well, wonder no more.

The trailer for Star Wars Episode III as it should have been. Warning: can be a bit crude. But horribly spot-on!

A Slashdot poster argues that the prequels actually do a good job. Well, I’ll have to wait until I see Episode Three—but I’m not holding my breath. George Lucas has utterly destroyed an incredible story.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m not thinking of wearing a Jedi costume to the premier. It’s the last time I’ll have that chance, after all…

I went and saw The Wallflowers with my youngest brother this evening. Wow! I hadn’t realised how many truly great songs they’d released: One Headlight, of course; Sixth Avenue Heartache too; but also Heroes and The Difference. I also didn’t realise that the lead singer is the son of Bob Dylan (which would explain why I thought he sounded like a cross between Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen at various points). They know how to handle a crowd (their opener too had this down pat)—at one point, the lead singer grabbed a fan’s cell phone and sang into it!

Also, I got to talk to a girl, so all in all it was a nice evening.

A Norwegian study finds that the eldest child is the smartest and best-educated. Given that I am the eldest, this comes as no surprise. I can’t wait until my brothers see it…

Joel Spolsky reports an unexpected fact: incentive pay hurts productivity. Research has shown that folks do worse when given incentives than when not!

Only you can save this fluffy white rabbit!

Pavel Kohout points out that Europe is rapidly becoming extinct. The birth rate in many parts is 1.2 children per woman—an absurdly low figure. And yet in the Islamic world continues to grow at a healthy pace: at current trends by 2050 there will be more people in Yemen than in Germany. The European welfare state is destroying itself. If leftists truly valued diversity, they would decry this: the loss of European culture is no less important than the loss of aboriginal Australian culture (indeed, considering the relative good to come out of each, rather more important).

Jonah Goldberg writes about the current votes-for-felons advocates. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats are in favour of allowing felons to vote. This is and should be a matter for the states to decide, although the right decision is to generally oppose it.

Interestingly, no-one comes out in support of the right of felons to bear arms…

It’s interesting to note that in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was 31 and Anne Bancroft was 36, yet he played a young man in his early twenties and she a woman in her very late forties or early fifties. There is a lesson to be learnt there.

I should explain first that I’m out of beer and won’t buy any until Monday. Well, I was up in my loft fetching some supplies when what do I find but a bottle of Aberlour 10 year old sitting all sad & lonesome in a crate. Life is good!

I like the idea of building with earth. Such things as flexible form rammed earth (aka Superadobe) and cob (warning—authoress is a New Age loon) are fascinating to me. For one thing, working in mud and clay offers much more exciting possibilities than a traditional wood-and-steel framing. For another, it’d just be so cool to build a house (or even just an out-building). Of course, the downside is that such homes probably have almost no resale value—but if one plans to live there for many years than it probably doesn’t matter much, and they’re so cheap that resale value’s really not all that important.

Maybe someday I’ll have a piece of land I can play with!

The Linux Cookbook (perhaps more accurately called The Unix Cookbook) is a collection of various clever ways to do thing on the command line. Worth a look, even if just to see how folks used to do things. Me, I still use the CLI for just about everything—it’s fast and pleasant to use, and doesn’t get in my way.

A long-time HP engineer writes on the disaster which was Carly Fiorina. The sidebar and other articles are very interesting. She was a truly loathed CEO and managed to drive one of the best tech companies around straight into the ground. As far as I know, rumours that she was secretly working for IBM are false, but she couldn’t have helped us more if she had…

Some time ago an economic study revealed that women who divorce see their standard of living fall by 27 percent, while men see theirs rise by 10 percent. The usual bluestocking saw this as a terrible example of discrimination against women; what they didn’t note is that marriage penalises men. A fellow could see his standard of living jump 10% just by getting a divorce. Given that men stay married, and given that we tend to be rational creatures, there must be a good reason that men marry.

Apparently it’s worth it to a fellow to be married, and so he pays his wife by allowing her to consume more than she would otherwise earn. The flip side, of course, is that women must not enjoy marriage: else why would there be a need to pay them to stick around? Very interesting thought.

My poor brother—no doubt suffering from an excess of corrosive air to the lungs, due to his residence in California—manages to completely and totally misunderstand my post regarding iTunes. I’m not advocating P2P (and neither is the original article I linked to); I’m getting my music these days from eMusic, which offers DRM-free MP3s. My dear brother fails to fully address my four criticisms of the iTunes Music Store: it’s too expensive; AAC is lossy; it’s unfair to artists; it’s really just a facelift for a corrupt industry.

iTunes costs too much: 99¢/track is way too high, comparable to the cost of a new CD and way more expensive. Yes, as Tom indicates there is the convenience factor. But my preferred provider offers them at 25¢–50¢, which means that a full CD runs $2–$8; at that price the cost/benefit analysis turns out much better for online downloads.

iTunes offers music in a poor format: AAC is lossy and DRMed. Yes, eMusic’s MP3s are also lossy (and the format itself is patented, which is awful)—but they are also cheaper and freer. If I’m going to be paying more than twice the price of a used CD, I’d like sound at least as good as that CD. The ideal would be music encoded in Ogg Vorbis (as a lossy, quick download format) and in FLAC for high-quality listening. As to DRM Tom says, Yeah, DRM sucks, but please explain to me how anybody makes any money if nobody's buying anything? Somehow the artists on eMusic are making money without DRMing their music. These aren’t necessarily indie artists, either: Otis Redding (well, his label is making money anyway); Frank Zappa; Townes van Zandt; 50 Cent; Green Day; Tom Waits; the Kinks; Bob Marley; Willie Nelson &c. Oh—if high-quality music is only 1½–2 times the size of poor-quality music, we don’t need huge jump in bandwidth to download it: we’d need twice the time or twice the bandwidth or some combination thereof.

iTunes is unfair to artists: Apple gets a 35% cut of each track for doing almost work. They rip the track and encode it into AAC, then make it available on their site and provide cheques on some schedule to the labels. This is not rocket science, folks. I don’t know what the standard discount for a record store is, but in books stores get a 40% discount—but they actually have to deal with leases, clerks and so on. I don’t know the terms of eMusic’s agreement with the labels, and so I don’t know if they’re better, but that doesn’t matter: I am not advocating for eMusic, but against the iTunes Music Store.

iTunes is too bogus. Nyaaah:-)

S.M. Hutchens writes brilliantly about the sexualisation of Protestant Christianity. I remember once being in a Southern Baptist meeting in which a hymn was sung whose words were, Oh yes, Lord, yes, yes, Lord, Oh yes! I don’t believe that I need to note whence exactly those pseudo-lyrics seem to have sprung.

You know, for years I have hated Valentine’s Day with a passion. Well, for this first time I might possibly have the hope of having a valentine—and suddenly I find that the observance has its plus points. I think that a fellow could get used to this.

This Dutchman used his lace-making skills to produce a chain-link fence with a lacy pattern. Pretty impressive, no?

The Virginia state legislature desires to ban the wearing low-slung trousers which reveal one’s boxers. Certainly this is a stupid fad, but it is not a fit matter for legislation. Moreover, why would it be decent to wear only boxers (which are after all named after pugilistic attire), but not pants thereover?

Someone should point out the legislators that the white shirts they wear under their coats are the stylised remnants of undershirts once daringly exposed a few centuries back…

Industry maven Michael Malone believes that there’s something rotten in Redmond—could Microsoft be on the beginning of its long slow descent?

I’ve recently added a recipe for chicken curry to my bachelor recipes page. Yummy!

On Thursday instant I passed 400 miles on my bike, a landmark of sorts. It’s good to be riding again after this long hiatus.

Jay Bryant has an article on the actual costs of Social Security. Taking advantage of the figures provided by the Social Security Administration and an extremely conservative investment strategy, he calculates that he would be able to retire today with more than four times the money that he will actually be getting. That is sad.

The Geek Code is a convenient shorthand for representing one’s geekiness. Mine is:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d+ s: a- C+++ ULSA++++ P--- L+++ E+++ W+++ N++ o+ K w--- O-- M- V-- PS++/-- PE++ Y+ PGP+ t--- 5++ X-- R tv--/+ b+++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h+ r--/--- !x--
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Well, I think it’s cool…

Anheuser-Busch donated two beers to each soldier in Iraq. Granted it was Budweiser, which isn’t really beer, but at least the guys got something. And even the under-21s were allowed to drink!

Imagine if the ACLU handled terror investigations.

In 1825 the US Congress gave the US Postal Service a monopoly on mail; what if we revoked the postal monopoly?

iTunes is bogus: it’s too expensive; AAC is lossy; it’s unfair to artists; it’s really just a facelift for a corrupt industry.

A lefty is concerned that maybe Bush has been right all along about Iraq.

Think you know movies? Well, play the Movie Game.

Are we willing to lose Afghanistan on a stupid point of idiocy? Christopher Hitchens fears so. Right now we are combing the countryside destroying the sole means of supports for most rural Afghanis: poppies. How long before this folly destroys all the goodwill we had accumulated?

The Romans had a habit of presenting crowns of various sorts to soldiers and generals who had earned them one way or another. There was a crown for breaking a siege; one for saving the life of a soldier; and so on. Very cool. Also, certain crowns merited freedom from taxes and the like. I think that we could profitably resume this custom. Let no Medal of Honour recipient ever pay any taxes again.

emms is the Emacs Multimedia System; it allows one to play audio and video (hence the multimedia…) from within emacs. Emacs, of course, is the Swiss Army text editor.

A man ran into the Oregon Senate and held a knife to his chest for about an hour. This really isn’t that big a deal, but an idiot senator (a Democrat, of course) says, We've tried to have as much public access as possible. Obviously, this is a dose of reality. How so? Who cares if a man manages to get into the Senate with a knife or other weapon? Surely everyone is armed and able to handle an attacker. Oh, they’re not—well that’s their own damned fault then.

Apple iProduct. You’ll buy it. And you’ll like it. And no, I really can’t see why folks get so excited over an unusable jelly-slop, DRMed music or ugly white cases. But that’s me.

Link does contain profanity, but that’s part of its charm.

An interesting interview with the pilot of the Enola Gay. He has no regrets about his mission, naturally.

A Slovak man drank his way to safety. His car was trapped in an avalanche, and as he tried to dig his way out he discovered that the car would fill with snow more quickly than he could dig. But then he realised that he could urinate on the snow to melt it down, and that he had eight gallons of beer in his car (he was going on vacation…). So he dug and drank and melted and dug and drank and melted for four days, finally escaping.

Theologian David B. Hart tackles the problem of natural disasters: how can a good God cause such things? I believe his answer is that He doesn’t: creation is in bondage to evil, and the natural order is perverted to foul ends. That’s my reading, anyway.

A man injured in the California train wreck scrawled a message for his family using his own blood, believing that he was soon to die. He wrote I ♥ my kids; I ♥ Leslie (his wife) in blood on a piece of wreckage. Fortunately for him, he survived. Unfortunately for him, the media desperately wish to get their claws on him. Leave the poor guy alone—he has better things to do than humiliate himself publicly in an interview.

In just grilled up a pair of elk of burgers for lunch. Elk has an interesting taste to it: it’s at once stronger and lighter than beef, with its own slightly peppery flavour. The one problem is that it is so low in fat: one really should add maybe a teaspoon of suet or lard (poss. a tablespoon?) per pound of ground elk to get a good, juicy burger. But as a meat, it has a lot to say for itself.

I’ve been told that American elk is the same as European red deer—no idea if that’s true, but if it is then it explains why many of the mediæval receipts for venison call for larding.

I have just published Penrod, by Booth Tarkington. From its description:

A wonderful coming-of-age story about a boy eleven going on twelve who gets himself into more trouble than any one lad should. From his improvised circus to the Great Tar Fight, there are plenty of laughs and a few touching moments as well. Few authors have quite so well captured those halcyon days when a boy is just about to start becoming a man. It does contain some possibly offensive archaic language.

This was a favourite of mine when growing up; I hadn't realised that its copyright had expired, but I’m glad to be able to make it available once more.

Michael Rubin has some interesting thoughts on Iraqi sovereignty It seems that we are making some mistakes which should be rectified.

In Typing Alone Mark Oppenheimer argues that a less liberal, more focused eduction with fewer extra-curricular activities and more time to think might be an excellent idea.

Judith Kleinfeld has a great article on gender differences. One very interesting point is that the distribution of intellectual abilities is very different for men and women: women have a very pronounced bell curve with short tails, most being average and few being exceptional in either direction; men have a much flatter curve with far longer tails. Thus while average cognitive ability is typically the same for men and women on most measures (there are some where there’s a difference), there are more really stupid and more really smart men. These differences show up even in the womb—far more boys than girls are miscarried due to defects. But, as she notes, women are more apt to look upward with anger than downward with relief.

As an example of the difference at the extremely high end of the spectrum, the proportion of 13 year olds scoring 700+ on the maths portion of the SAT is 13:1. No doubt the extremely low end would be similar.

All this goes to demonstrate that there are fundamental differences between men and women. Which should come as no surprise to anyone.

The San Diego News Notes (a Roman Catholic right-to-life paper) has an interview with a woman working in an abortion clinic. We castigate the Nazis for their slaughter of the Jews, and rightly so, but when will we do something about a practise which has slain tens of millions?

Since I have recently started publishing hitherto out-of-print books, I have also found a use for all those proofreader’s marks which they taught in school and which I promptly forgot. Those of you still being educated (yeah, John & Stephen: that’s you) might find them useful.

For my own part, I am amazed by how many errors I have found. There’s something like one error per page. Interestingly, they cluster: some pages have none and others three or four.

Tonight I made a batch of soap (6 oz. almond oil; 10 oz. olive oil; 2 oz. lye; 6 oz. water, not in that order) and milled an old batch I’d lying about the house. The old batch happened to be the first I ever made, composed of old corn oil from my fryer and lard (cleaned, of course), with some spices added to make it pleasant-smelling. Tonight I ground it all and remolded it, adding some olive oil to ‘superfat’ it (making it very good for the skin) as well as lemon & clove oils and pearberry scent. The bars look very good—I’m going to enjoy using them.

No, it has nothing to do with sex: the venereal game has to do with naming groups of animals: a romp of otters; a troop of monkeys; a shiver of sharks; a descent of woodpeckers. The US Geological Survey have a listing of venereal names; a googling will find more, of course. The root of the phrase, of course, is venery, which means both hunting and sex—the conflation is for obvious reasons, although the dictionaries claim otherwise.

Paul Graham, brilliant as ever, has written What You’ll Wish You’d Known, an undelivered speech for high school students. In it he gives students excellent advice on how to succeed in life—and it’s not what one might think.

Michael Moore’s bodyguard was arrested for illegally carrying a gun. So let me get this straight: it’s okay for Michael Moore to be protected by a man with a firearm, but not okay for Bob Uhl to be? Gosh, that makes a lot of sense. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, Mr. Moore: if you want the rest of us to be defenceless, lay down your arms first.

ING Direct offer a 2.35% APR on their savings accounts, with no fees and no minimums. And I just converted to USAA to get 1.20%…

An officer in Iraq has written Aiding and Abetting the Enemy, about how the news media deliberately mis-reports the war. Thanks to my brother Tom for the link.

A few months back my mother was down in sunny Texas and picked up a table which had belonged to my dad’s grandfather. It’s the sort who leaves & legs fold such that it becomes a kind of credenza against the wall, and came with four chairs. It’s funny to think that this table and these chairs now sit in my home, in front of a television which their creator could not conceive, a cordless phone their carpenter could not imagine and a computer their joiner could not have dreamt in the wildest of pizza-induced dreams (indeed, it’s quite probable that he went to his grave without ever having eaten a pizza). It may not be the kind of history one gets from growing up down the road from Bosworth Field, but it’s the kind of history I can get…

Reviewing my accounts from last year, something occurred to me: I’m not getting a good bargain in regards to the government. With the money that I spend in taxes I could hire 1–2 armed guards to accompany me everywhere or watch my property—were it not, of course, for the minimum wage laws. But in a free country, where I could pay what a man desired to work for, I would be able to very easily afford one, and could manage two, on very good terms, too (room, board and good wages).

One might object that my two-man entourage could never protect me from a horde of rampaging Canadians, Mexicans or Wyomingites. But it wouldn’t just be my two and me: it’d mine, and me, and those of my employer and his employer and so on up the chain. And if every middle-class family in Colorado had at least two armsmen, I can pretty much guarantee that Wyoming would never invade. Not if they knew what be good for them, anyway (yes, ‘be’ is the proper subjunctive form).

This raises the question: what the hell am I paying for? For a long time my thought has been that paying for the police and military are worthwhile—but the numbers don’t lie: it’s more profitable for me to pay for it myself. I want my money back, and I want my retainers, and I want to make the federal, state and local governments as small as humanly possible.

A curious thing happened this evening. I’d just returned from running some errands and was walking to my condo when I heard a noise. Turning my head I discovered a dog trailing its lead—apparently the creature had pulled itself loose somehow. It seemed very shy and cautious of me, so I went up and poured some chili in a bowl (so far as I know, there’s nothing about beef, beans, corn, red pepper flakes & black pepper that might make a dog ill) and returned with it in an attempt to gain its trust. It was a shy little guy: he’d only approach the bowl and eat if I were a few paces away. He seemed to have a tag on his collar; I was hoping that I’d be able to get him to trust me enough to check it, but he never let me approach. Even my traditional technique of letting the beast smell my hand, then scratching behind the ears didn’t work. Perhaps my gloves smelled funky.

I didn’t wish to let him get away; it’s well after dark and the poor thing could get run over quite easily. Eventually his lead trailed next to a fence, and I was able to lash it thereto. I called animal control, but by the time they called back his owner had come looking for him. Poor woman was quite out of her mind worrying.

To tell the truth, I rather wish that she’d not appeared. It was a handsome animal (although I couldn’t tell its breed: low to the ground, black with a white neck, and somewhat shaggy; maybe a spaniel of some sort), and I’ve been wanting to get a dog for awhile now. It looked like the sort which would have loved to go hunting up in the mountains. I’d have been glad to own him.

I’ve just published The Mystery of Cloomber by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A family moves into the strange house of Cloomber and proceeds to shut themselves up tightly therein. What could be their secret, and what do they fear?

Fed up with worms, viruses, spam and spyware, people are giving up their computers, or at least giving up the Internet. Well, that’s what they get using Windows. If you stick a petri dish out in an influenza ward, you’re gonna grow junk; if you stick a vat of Lysol out there you won’t.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t get worms; I don’t get viruses; I don’t get infested with spyware. I use Linux, and I’m happy.

You won’t see this reported, but the federal deficit is shrinking; Kudlow attributes it to the booming economy.

Smokers, take heart: Forces International is here to represent your interest against the lies of anti-smoking zealots. They also advocate against the food police and the latest silly superstition to hit the stage: being over-sensitive to smell.

Why quit smoking? The average lifespan would increase by 15–20 months if all forms of cancer, cardiovascular disease and other causes of death (including traffic accidents) (including those completely unrelated to smoking) were completely eliminated from the population. For cancer alone, that figure is 15 days. Well, I for one am willing to trade 15 days for a lifetime of happiness.

The New Yorker has a great article about how Army officers are using the Internet. The end has the standard media depression over the war, but the meat of the article is really quite good.

Rafael Peralta gave his life heroically in Fallujah and has since been treated scandalously.

According to the Telegraph, the BBC has gone out of its way not to mention the US and Australian military relief of tsunami victims. Unsurprising, as knee-jerk anti-Americanism seems standard with them.

Every wonder why it seems that everyone and his brother has allergies, has conditions, has something wrong with him these days? It’s the nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect. We believe that something will harm us, and so it does. This goes a long way towards explaining modern hypochondria.

In Personal Chemistry & the Healthy Body, Gerald Weinberg stresses the importance of a healthy lifestyle to professional advancement. The folks who receive preferment are those who have a good appearance, are energetic & composed and project an aura of leadership and charisma. Something to work on!

Well, for the first time since before summer I’ve brewed a batch of beer. It’s been something of a comedy of errors unfortunately: I reversed the hopping schedule (bittering with aroma hops and flavouring with bittering hops) and somehow managed to to plug the cooling sink up right, and so all the nice ice cold water for chilling the wort went right down said sink, leaving me with no way to rapidly cool it. Still, I’ve had worse brewing nights, and I see no reason to think that my beer won’t turn out all right in the end.

I went to Caerthe’s Twelfth Night today. I gotta say that when the SCA shines, it really shines: where else could one get crown roast of lamb with barley, savory toasted cheese with mushrooms, pickled Roman cabbages (Brussels sprouts), parsnips & carrots, bread pudding, saumon caudle (salmon soup), chickens in hocchee (chickens stuffed with grabes and garlic), minted peas, sambocade (a sweet cheese tart something like a softer cheesecake) with sour cherry sauce and wardens in syrup (pears in a sweet red wine sauce) for $14? And that was just dinner; lunch involved a stuffed boar’s head, brawn with mustard, stewed potatoes, buttered cauliflowers, mushrooms alexandre, a Hanseatic stollen (fruitcake), meringues, candied lemon peels and fruit—and was included in the same price.

Of course, with all this well-done and authentic food one did also have to put up with the sort of folks who have no idea of what real history was like; perhaps inspired by others they will improve in time.

My friend (and kinda godson—I sponsored him for confirmation) Buzz Anderson writes on the topic of data structures as culture, inspired by a friend’s interview at Microsoft which featured trees and his own interviewing experience at Apple which heavily features hash tables. What, one might ask, is a tree and why would a programmer care about it—and for that matter, what’s a hash table?

When dealing with data in a computer, one often needs to search for a particular datum. This could be done by scanning every last bit of memory to find it, but that would be extremely slow. So instead we somehow associate a key with the data, and look for the key instead. But it’s still too slow to just search through a list of keys to find the one we’re looking for: on average one must examine half the keys to see if they match (what we call O(x), since performance is directly proportional to the number of keys); this can get quite expensive. So we computer scientists build data structures which enable faster searching and use of data.

A tree is arranged like an upside-down tree, with the root at the top and the leaves at the bottom. The entire thing is composed of nodes elements which contain a key, a datum and two child nodes (the leaf nodes have no children). Moreover, there is a constraint on the nodes: the no node in the left-hand subtree (the tree which has the left-hand child node as its root) has a key is greater than the root’s key, and every node in the right-hand subtree has a greater key than the root’s. To search the tree for a number (say, 42), one first visits the root node and checks its key. If it’s 42, then you’re done: return the datum. If its key is greater than 42, then check the left-hand subtree in the same way; otherwise check the right-hand subtree. Keep on doing this until you find the key or run out of nodes to examine. A binary tree provides what we refer to as O(log x) performance: a substantial improvement over linear searching.

A hash tree is best visualised as a black box (there are a lot of different ways to implement them): you give it a key, and it returns the data in constant time. That is, whether the table contains one key or for one million, the time to retrieve the data is the same. This means that a hash table’s performance is O(1)—it’s proportional only to 1. This is really cool: it means that we need never care about how large our data set grows, since performance will be as predictable as it ever was.

You might be asking why hash tables aren’t the only data structure ever used, then. The answer is that the constant time they take is relatively slow compared to trees for small data sets—and the logarithmic time that trees run in is relatively slow compared to linear search for very small data sets. Thus even in a modern program there are probably a few places that use a simple linear search, and in others places using trees, and in others using hash tables.

The beauty of a hash table, though, is that it is conceptually the cleanest and best of the structures. You know that performance on the developer’s workstation with a toy data set will be the exact same as in the field with $100,000,000 worth of financial transactions; you know that you're ready for the future. It’s telling that Apple cares about hash tables and Microsoft about trees. Tree are a speed hack when can bite one in production, but are great when developing; hash tables take up a bit more resources, but are much more durable.

Sleepy Owl Press has published two more books by G.K. Chesterton.

The Innocence of Father Brown

Twelve of G.K. Chesterton's superlative Fr. Brown mysteries. Fr. Brown is a Roman Catholic priest who solves the most varied type of mysteries in the traditional English manner of Miss Marple and Sherlock Holmes. A wonderful read!

What’s Wrong with the World

A classic work on philosophy, imperialism, feminism, education and what is to be done about all the above.

Both are $9.99. Now that I’ve published three Chesterton works, I’m next turning my attention to Doyle—and after that, Kipling! Not so certain which authors will intrigue me enough to add after that, though.

A Swedish woman lost her husband, her two-year-old and her mother in the Asian tsunami just a day after she and her husband had a second wedding. One knows neither the time nor the hour indeed.

Naseer Flayih Hasan has written How the Left Betrayed my Country—Iraq. A biting commentary on the dishonesty, cynicism and ignorance of the Left.

I have just published G.K. Chesterton’s Alarms \& Discursions in a new attractively typeset edition. The book is a collection of miscellaneous essays on politics, religion and philosophy first published in 1911. The cover price is $9.99—contact me for bulk orders.

A record of unmitigated failure. Really pretty sad.

The Encyclopædia Mythica is a massive reference to all sort of mythologies and creatures. Looks like it only covers real mythologies (e.g. Greek and Inuit), not created ones (e.g. Lovecraft & Tolkien), though.

Thinkgeek have a plasma mug: a glass mug which acts as a plasma ball. Extremely cool.

Kendall and Christopher Phelps are both deploying to Iraq in the same unit. Good for them, and good luck to them!

Did you know that the United States had an emperor from 1859 to 1880? What a wonderful true story!

After a four-day weekend, and after two weeks of working half days, I must now work a full eight-hour day. I am not looking forward to it. Grumble…

In this same document, I find an anecdote of General Grant on the subject of duelling:

I do not believe I ever would have the courage to fight a duel. If any man should wrong me to the extent of my being willing to kill him, I would not be willing to give him the choice of weapons with which it should be done, and of the time, place and distance separating us, when I executed him. If I should do another such a wrong as to justify him in killing me, I would make any reasonable atonement within my power, if convinced of the wrong done.

The rest of this article has been retracted.

Apparently the officers of the Texan Navy made a habit of growing their hair down their backs in the fine old British tradition. Bully for them!

Found a link to a list of eleven ways to be a guy. Sage advice, really.

Apparently the recent mass survival of animals and the mass-death of men in the Asian tsunami has led to a renewed investigation of the supposed sixth sense of the beasts which warned them of the impending calamity. Interestingly, my pastor noted just this morning noted that if one lives one’s life in accordance with God’s will and is receptive to His word, then one is more likely to be warned of events before they happen (taking the example of St. Joseph, who was warned by an angel to leave Judea, told when he could return and warned to turn away from his path for safety’s sake). It seems to me that animals—which have no free will and thus can neither sin nor do good, but merely fulfil their appointed roles—may indeed, since they are less fallen than men (for they never sinned, but were merely twisted thereby), be able to know of impending mass danger.

Or perhaps it’s simply that the shore-creatures hear the cries of the sea-creatures caught up in the wave and flee, and the inland-creatures hear the cries of the fleeing shore-creatures, and all head for the hills. But it doesn’t seem out of the question to me for the less-fallen to be more in tune with God—which is also to say, more in tune with everything in God’s creation (which perhaps explains the many clairvoyant saints as well).