Octopodial Chrome

Well, another year is about to expire. In the past 366 days we’ve seen more of Janet Jackson than anyone would want to; we’ve defeated the most left-wing candidate ever to stand for President; we saw a witch-hunt which ended with Martha Stewart jailed; we saw the winningest man ever to play Jeopardy—and we saw him lose. On a personal note, I gained a sister-in-law, which is excellent; I finally started my mediæval weapons collection; and I saw my financial position improve as the stock market slowly rebounds. It wasn’t a great year, but it wasn’t all that bad a year either. Here’s hoping that 2005 exceeds ’04 in the good and falls behind in the bad. Happy New Year!

I just discovered a handy LaTeX reference, Formatting Information: A Beginner’s Introduction to Typesetting with LaTeX. LaTeX, of course, is just about the best document preparation and typesetting system ever, capable of producing professional-quality output easily.

Another perspective on English style is that of George Orwell in Politics and the English Language. A great read whose advice boils down to:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Very good advice.

A little over a week ago I was nearly run off of the road by a woman in a Chevy 4x4 with the license plate 048-KLE, apparently annoyed that I should have the temerity to use the road (as is the right of every cyclist, and in some cases the duty too). Should I be smashed by a hit-and-run, one might wish to check that vehicle for scrapes…

Fowler’s 1908 classic The King’s English is now online at Bartleby. It’s the definitive guide to proper style, written at a time whose pronouncements on the matter may be safely trusted. Now I just need to read it and take its lessons to heart.

Michael Wiedmann has a great reference for screen presentation (e.g. PowerPoint) tools which focuses on those which run on open platforms (and maybe Windows/Mac OS X as well).

I see that Missouri has legalised noodling—fishing for catfish with one’s bare hands and feet. Be sure to follow the link: there are pictures of some monster cats!

I recently found Corsets & Crinolines, a collection of photos of antique & vintage clothing. Unfortunately, it’s all women’s clothing, and thus useless for my own research, but pretty cool nonetheless.

A man sold the Christmas gifts he’d gotten for his sons on eBay—because they misbehaved. Good for him!

Back in ’03 Clay Shirky gave an interesting speech on group dynamics. It discusses how groups can devolve without structure and order, and how those are vitally necessary to the long-term welfare of the group as a whole (which is unexpected to many and unwelcome to those with a lefty viewpoint). It also details how technology can enable new ways of working within a group, which is pretty cool. Well worth the read.

I received a catalogue from the local stationer’s; one of the items is a Merry Christmas from Heaven ornament which reads:

I love you all dearly,
Now don’t shed a tear,
I’m spending my Christmas
With Jesus this year.

What kind of sick jerk would send such a thing? I can’t think of something worse to receive such a thing when sad & miserable. What is this world coming to?

Listening to Rebel Rouser this evening, it occurred to me what a fine tune it is. Like November Rain or In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, it has he quality that it could be played for an hour or two and not seem amiss.

I remember the wonderful autumn of the year I was graduated from Austin College. I had more money than I knew what to do with, having gone from $400/mo. to a rather more livable sum; I dined out frequently; my life was a whirlwind of activity and fun.

One night early that November I dined at the Chez Walter, a now-defunct Swiss place. I noticed that they were to have a prix fixe menu specially for Thanksgiving. This looked like a fantastic deal: enjoy some top-quality food at something of a bargain price and celebrate the holiday in style. But of course my parents wouldn’t hear of it: I got more grief and caterwauling than I’d ever received before (payment, perhaps, for the grief and caterwauling I dealt when having my teeth pulled…). Oh well, of course there’s always another chance.

But of course, there was no other chance. Every year, Thanksgiving and then Christmas would roll around, and every year the finest establishments in town would offer various prix fixe and table d’hôte options (each one enticing and attractive) and each year all I wanted was to go to church, eat a nice quiet meal in a nice quiet atmosphere and go home and have a nice quiet day in which napping would figure heavily—and each year I was prevented due to my family’s demand that I dine with them. Oh well, this wasn’t that big deal: I do love them, and they are in town, and it does seem a bit wrong not to celebrate holidays with family in town, and my mother and father are absolutely wonderful cooks, and after all someday I’d have the chance to realise my dream.

Well, this year I thought that I’d have that chance. They are all going to be headed to Grand Junction and will be staying the duration. This means that at long last I have no obligations and can finally have a perfect Christmas. Except that they tried to get me to go with them (which is fundamentally absurd: five people in a college student’s flat is the sort of thing that even a French surrealist would abhor, among other reasons), and gave me so much grief in front of other people that some very good friends of mine took pity on me (mistakenly believing that I’d be sad and alone on Christmas, when it fact it is my very dearest desire to have a quiet day on my own) and invited me to their place, and so of course I was honour-bound to accept their invitation.

Now this is all fine and dandy: my friends are outstanding and good people, and I always have a great time with them, and anticipate having a superlative time on Saturday, and will be glad to have gone. But I still won’t have been able to go to church, eat a nice dinner and then take some nice long naps. Four Christmases have come and gone; five Thanksgivings have come and gone, and I still haven’t realised my dream! Five years—half a decade; 1/15th of my life—have passed, and I still haven’t been able to have a Thanksgiving or Christmas ordered as I would have it.

I visited a website promoting a 28-hour day. The premise is that instead of 7x24-hour days in a week one instead has 6x28-hour days. The length of the week doesn’t change, and one still works a full work week (10x4 instead of 8x5). It sounds like a pretty cool idea. Perhaps once I start working from home I can start doing it.

Check out Black Box Recorder, a band out of England with an amazing, hard-to-describe sound: a kind of retro-pop-sophistication which wouldn’t sound at all out of place in a cocktail lounge, except for its often bitter subject matter. I can’t say that I agree with their politics, but I can say that any man who can remain unmoved by Sarah Nixey’s vocals is no man at all. I highly recommend The Facts of Life.

I recently got myself a membership at emusic, a legal MP3 download service. They have a large number of indie/college bands (like Black box Recorder, Dressy Bessy, 16 Horsepower &c., but they also have mainstream artists like Otis Redding, Green Day, Bush, Violent Femmes, Willie Nelson and so on. The deal is that when you sign up you get 50 free downloads; after that it’s $10/mo. for 40 songs/mo., $15/mo. for 65 songs/mo. and $20/mo. for 90 songs/mo. You can always redownload a song you’ve gotten before without affecting your monthly cost. It’s also possible to buy additional one-time downloads for a price. The deal isn’t quite as good as used to be (a few years back, I believe it was one price for unlimited downloads), but it’s pretty good, and a lot cheaper than buying a CD which will just sit on the bookshelf, and at 22–25¢/track, cheaper than the other online music stores.

If you decide that you’d like to use the free trial (imagine: 50 legal, high-bit-rate MP3s), let me know so I can invite you: I get 10 free tracks with each successful referral.

In 1897 the highest ranks of England gathered for a costume party. The images are quite interesting and in some cases rather amusing. Oddly enough, some of those present would live into the 1960s.

I want a Neuros. Completely open; has a mike; transmits FM; plays Ogg Vorbis. A bit pricey, though: $280 for the full bundle of player, flash backpack, earphones, belt clips and a charger.

Slashdot recently reviewed Mathematics and Sec; sounds like an interesting book. Among its findings, if one has a run of n possible mates who after rejection will never be seen again, then one’s optimal strategy is to sample the first x = n/e (where e is the base of natural logarithms, 2.7183), then take the first one thereafter who is better than the previous x. This applies for anything, of course—even job applicants.

A commenter linked to an economic model developed at the University of Texas concerning ecstasy and the costs and benefits of faking it. Very curious.

Another commenter linked to Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend, which mathematically demonstrates that there are 18,726 gals whom he might like and who might like him, and that meeting one new girl a week it would take 3,493 weeks to meet even one of the 18,726—67 years. In other words, he will never have a girlfriend.

Beware so-called trusted computing. Can you trust your computer?

Ted Turner wrote on media consolidation this year; while I often disagree with him one must admit that he has achieved some remarkable successes, and this is an area in which he has no little amount of expertise.

In 1894 James Parker published his Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry. In certain respects it is incomplete, but it remains still a valuable resource for the student of that noble science.

No-one who has followed recent American politics can be ignorant of the recent calls for blue-state (i.e. Democrat) secession. The New York Times has an article concerning Yankee secession. The best quote comes from a Southerner, in regards to the rather remotely possible War of Southern Aggression: We could go up there and get back some of the stolen silverware they looted from our ancestors 140 years ago.

Although I believe that secession is a fundamental right of a state, it would be nice to give the God-bedamnéd Yankees a taste of their own medicine.

Three hundred thousand Yankees,
Lie stiff in Southern dust,
We got three hundred thousand,
Before they conquered us,
They died of Southern fever,
And Southern steel and shot,
And I wish it was three million,
Instead of what we got.

It’d be quite satisfying to conquer them for a change.

Given the choice between having his wedding ring or his finger cut off, a US Marine chose to lose the finger in order to honour his wife. Unfortunately, the ring was lost nonetheless in the chaos of it all. I hate to say this, but the guy was unwise. Any physical thing is recoverable or replaceable: had the ring been cut off, he could have saved the fragments and had them remade into a new ring; even had the pieces been lost, he could have simply gotten a new ring. But now he’s lost his finger and his ring together—he can still replace the wedding band, but his finger will never return.

Still, one must respect a man who pays homage to his wife and his marriage in such a manner. A man who will give his finger for his wedding ring is surely a man who would give his life for his wife. he may have been unwise, but perhaps sometimes it’s best to be unwise.

Now this is the sort of essay any admissions officer would be glad to read.

A small, unremarked portion of CNN’s coverage of President Bush’s medical report notes that he smokes an occasional cigar. I’m heartened to read it. Can one trust a man who despises tobacco? I don’t believe so.

The Morning News offers a list of Good Gift Games for 2004; Funagain Games offer the Games Magazine 2005 Awards. Regarding the latter, it seems strange to number the awards for a year which hasn’t yet arrived.

Saw in Mike Adams’s most recent column this not-so-fun fact: Planned Parenthood has murdered far more innocent people than the KKK and the Nazi Party combined. Sad but true.

The Straight Dope takes on the pressing question: did the Vikings wear hornéd helmets? The answer is unsurprising to a cynic like me.

Britain has banned fox hunting, sadly enough. The things are pests, for Pete’s sake!

Combining this cartoon and a passage I read in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, I’ve realised that the secret of immortality is to do something so notable that generations to come study one. I never realised it at the time, but there is a certain undeniable absurdity to an 18 year old studying a man dead almost half a millennium ago. And yet there’s something fundamentally awesome (in the original sense of the word) in that as well. It’s reassuring to think that we still try to get our children to see the world with a bit of perspective.

Well, I’d the rottenest Thanksgiving thus far. My brother Thomas was on the East Coast celebrating with his new wife (which is right and proper—but I miss them both nonetheless). I’m recovering from surgery and in no small amount of pain. My brothers spent the day playing Halo 2 on an XBox, despite a plethora of board and card games we could have played together, enjoying one another’s company. I had to work the day after Thanksgiving, which has normally been a holiday. And one of my brothers decided to harangue me with his imbecilic and thoroughly ignorant economic theories (worthy of a Kerry voter, not of anyone with an IQ above room temperature) throughout dinner, rather than discussing pleasant subjects.

On the plus side, the turkey was excellent. My mother brined it this year, an excellent and commendable idea. And I did manage to do a decent job of carving the bird, which was gratifying. Other than that, it was a thoroughly miserable day: the most enjoyable thing I did all day was take a nap after dinner.

Some guys got together and built a throne out of AOL CDs. I want one!

Dinesh D'Souza wrote a great article about why he loves America; worth reading, all you lefty sorts.

A priest I know forwarded this report from the Hebrew Press. It appears to have come from a Jewish blog, so one doubts that it is Greek or Orthodox fabrication. The story does note that there are different deaths for Mr. Kanidis.

In an act of unlimited devotion and dedication,to the bitter end, an elderly teacher insisted on remaining with his students. He protected them, bandaged their wounds, and with his death,saved their lives.

Children who escaped from the school told of how they owed their lived to elderly Yanis(Ivan)Kanidis, age 74—a man of Greek origin who worked as a gym teacher at the school. He was among the hundreds of teachers, students and parents taken hostage last week when Chechen rebels invaded the large school.

On Thursday, in what was an unusual humanitarian move in the midst of the horror, the terrorists agreed to allow a group of women and babies to leave the building. The commander of the terrorist squad, saw Kanidis—a sickly elderly man [ed: one wonders at how these bastards can show some mercy towards infants and the elderly, but not to children—but then their so-called prophet married a little girl, as they admit]—and offered to allow him to walk free as well.

But Kanidis refused. I will stay with my students till the end, the teacher insisted.

Whatever you say, said the terrorist, dismissing him with a wave of the hand.

He was just like Janus Korzchak, who accompanied his pupils to Auschwitz, said one of the students who was saved.

Like Korzchak, Kanidis didn't just accompany his students, he guarded their lives. On Friday, when the children began to lose consciousness from the stuffy air and their thirst, Yanis went to the terrorists. You have to give them something to drink, at least to the smallest children, he insisted angrily. One of the terrorists hit him with the butt of his rifle, but the teacher continued to yell: How dare you!? You claim you are people of the Kafkaz region,but here in the Kafkaz even a dog wouldn't turn down the request of an old man!

His efforts bore fruit. The terrorist allowed the teacher to wet one of the bibs of the children and pass it around to dampen the mouths of the little ones who were choking from thirst. The hostages who escaped told how the teacher repeatedly risked his own life in order to save the children. He moved explosive devices that the terrorists had placed near the young students, and tried to prevent them from detonating others.

When the first bomb exploded next to the windows of the school, parents and children began to run out. The terrorists, trying to prevent their escape, threw a grenade at them. The elderly teacher ran to the grenade to prevent it from exploding on the children. One of the terrorists shot at the teacher to try to stop him and Yanis was wounded in the shoulder—but didn't give up.

With the last of his strength, he continued to run, jumped on the grenade, covering it with his body.

The grenade exploded, and the body of the teacher absorbed the explosion, protecting the children around him from injury.

If true, it’s quite a tale.

A CNN article about a wealthy man who worked as a janitor in retirement and left a large sum to a university mention one Oseola McCarty, of Hattiesburg, Miss.: a washerwoman who donated $150,000 to The University of Southern Mississippi. Now that’s a story worth reading: a little old lady spends her life scrimping and saving, and then in 1995 she gave 60% of her accumulated wealth to a school regarding which she noted, they used to not let coloured people go out there, but now they do, and I think they should have it. I don’t believe that I could be so forgiving.

Anyway, this old woman never learnt to drive a car and only purchased an air conditioner at about the time of her gift—and despite the attention she got back in ’95, she never seemed to really take much note of all the fuss. A remarkable story; I encourage the reader to peruse the entire site. She passed away in 1999.

CNN have an article on crunk—what is it? So far as I can tell, another form of debased amusic for the hypocephalic sub-men who make up an ever-larger percentage of our population.

Every year the RCMP riot squad practise their skill against a local barony’s SCA fighters. This is just way to cool:riot police against armoured fighters. Originally spotted in a link to a web forum.

James S. Robbins writes about the Afghani talwildar (key-holders) who preserved their nation’s treasures through the chaos of Soviet invasion and Taliban theocracy. After a quarter century their task is complete, and they have returned the priceless artifacts they guarded.

Samuel Pepys has the oldest blog in existence. I find this curiously amusing.

One of the signs of getting older is when one is driving in a car, sees a pretty girl and start to ogle…appreciate her personality from afar—only to realise that there’s a baby on the seat next to her. I suppose that this is no big deal in the slums, when it happens at 13, but out here it’s something of a blow when one realises that one has become old enough that one’s contemporaries are old enough to get married and have children.

Well, something even worse happened yesterday. I was in a store, saw a pretty gal, then saw her kid and didn’t even care. I guess I ought to buy a coffin now…

I’ve recently been watching Alias, a television series about a gal in the intel biz. Last night as she and her fellow agent entered a Swedish nightclub, I realised something: everywhere they go, she changes costume—this night it might be one type of dress, tomorrow another and the next day something else entirely—while his disguise always consists of a coat and tie. Now, far be it for me to disdain coat and tie, but doesn’t it seem unfair to us fellows that we do not get a chance to show off in order to attract gals, while they get to show off to attract us? Not that I mind them showing themselves off, of course—but it’d be cool to be able to do the same.

I think I could figure out that. The whole having-a-personality thing is much more difficult…

On Thursday I changed out the oil in my deep fryer and in the process filled up one of my used-oil bottles. This presented me with a bit of a problem: what to do with the foul stuff. It seems wrong to just cast it into the dustbin, and I’ve only so many cast iron kitchen utensils to season.

Someone suggested that I burn it in a lamp, and I’ve recently bid on and won a very nice piece, but a lamp only uses up oil so quickly. Someone else suggested that I make soap from it, and another posted a procedure meant to strip much of the reek from oil. So I tried it, and now have a pie-plate’s worth of new soap curing. I seasoned it with hyssop, ginger, cardamom, clove & cinnamon in the hopes of covering the lard and used-corn-oil smell, decreased though that might have been by the washing procedure (it involves boiling with water, salt and baking soda). I also added a bit of olive oil, but that’s not an offensive smell. They soap-cakes don’t seem to smell like anything other than soap, so it seems to have worked.

Jonah Goldberg sets the record straight on John Ashcroft. A must-read, if only for the real story behind the topless statue cover-up.

Apparently many television stations are refusing to air Saving Private Ryan because they fear the FCC. The Commission refuses to tell them whether or not airing it would be permissible, claiming that it would be censorship if they told them beforehand. As though it weren’t censorship to do it afterwards as well!

Whatever happened to free speech? If you’re a parent who doesn’t wish your kids to see the film, don’t let them. If they see it anyway, well that’s part of growing up. If you’re an adult who doesn’t wish to see it, then don’t.

Twits who whine about being offended by what they choose to view annoy me to no end.

Michael Ledeen writes engagingly on the Theo van Gogh murder. His thesis is that the murderer was a product of a European attitude which is beyond tolerance, a kind of suicidal ignorance of one’s enemies.

Recently found How to Write Unmaintainable Code; it’s an amusing compendium of how not to write code. I’ve a nasty feeling I’ve done some of it, too…

It occurs to me that we on the right are not really all that different from those on the left: for the most part, we want the same things; it’s just that we disagree on how to achieve them. We conservatives want to lift up the poor; we want to ensure that no-one goes to bed hungry; we want health care to be affordable; we want every able student to get a good education—we just believe, based on sound economic principles, that a free market will do a far better and fairer job of ensuring that outcome than will state socialism; those on the left disagree.

We all want to prevent unjust killing: it’s just that those on the left see nothing wrong with slaying infants yet object to executing child rapists or fighting a war against a bloody tyrant. We on the right see things rather reversed.

We all want a clean environment: no-one wants the air he breathes to be filthy or the water he drinks to be foul. We differ on how far to go, yes. And it seems to me that the Right could care a bit more for nature than we appear to (although how much of that is media trickery is another matter).

None of us argues that we should be cruel to animals or wasteful of resources. We do disagree on what exactly is cruel or wasteful—but we agree in principle.

No-one openly advocates racism. There are many on the Left who advocate racism against whites, but I believe for the most part they are in the minority, just as those on the Right who are racists are in the minority (although there are rather more of the former than the latter).

No-one, Right or Left, wishes women to be legally subservient to me.

Even on the issue of gay marriage (very probably the reason we won the recent election), my own perception is that the vast majority of Americans are willing to live and let live when it comes to homosexuals: very, very few would argue that their lifestyle should be illegal. Most would support some sort of civil union carrying with it many of the rights which civil marriage carries.

We all agree that religious freedom is important. Many on the Right don’t see prayer in school as infringing on that freedom—I happen to disagree—while many on the Left seem to think that religious freedom means never being reminded that anyone has a religion. But thoughtful people on both sides, I think, can come to an agreement on most issues.

It seems to me that our similarities outweigh our differences and that if we could recognise this then tempers needn’t run quite so high, as they recently have amongst the ignorant.

Well, Bush beat Kerry. This is good—as bad as George Bush has been, Kerry would have been far, far, far worse. It was important to defeat him, and so far as presidential elections go it was a pretty decisive victory. Here in Colorado, unfortunately, Democrats took the contested Senate seat as well as both houses of our state legislature.

Worse yet, an alternative-energy amendment to our constitution passed, which will drive up energy prices without any real effect. On the good side, the amendment to destroy our electoral significance died an ignominious death.

Worst of all, an amendment to massively increase tobacco taxes passed with flying colours. The benighted, tyrannical, foolish, despotic, evil voters decided to steal money from smokers, chewers and snuff-takers and use those ill-gotten funds for anti-tobacco propaganda. The worst of it is that the brunt of these punitive measures will be borne by poor folks. I don’t really care that my few tins a year will go up (well, I do, but it doesn’t really hurt me), but the poor slob who smokes a pack a day will end up spending hundreds extra a year to fund a campaign dedicated to opposing him. It’s like Hitler raising taxes on the Jews to fund an anti-Semitic newspaper.

Given that God likes freedom (He gave us free will, after all), and given that it’s a sin to oppose His will, I am certain that every single bastard who voted for the accurséd legislation will spend eternity burning in Hell. I feel sorry for them: their victory in this life will seem as naught compared to their misery in the next. On the other hand, they deserve every lick of flame and every lash of the whip, so I’m not shedding too many tears for them (I have too many faults of my own to regret). They had the chance to do what is right, and they chose the path of iniquity.

At least John Kerry won’t be president. That would have been an absolute disaster, probably worse than the Clinton years (for the stakes are higher now).

I’ve just ordered The Knights Next Door. It looks to be a very interesting read about the SCA and other recreational mediaevalists. I can’t wait for it to arrive.

As I write, things look favourable for Bush, but we’re not out of the woods yet. A Kerry victory would be disastrous for this nation and would doom our efforts to defeat radical Islamism, and yet some 36 million voters (at the current count) support his agenda. The states still up for grabs (as well as the current counts) by the C-SPAN reckoning are: Washington (50-49 Bush); Oregon (43-57 Kerry); Nevada (48-51 Kerry); Colorado (52-47 Bush); New Mexico (51-48 Bush); Minnesota (45-54 Kerry); Iowa (48-51 Kerry); Michigan (48-51 Kerry); Wisconsin (48-51 Kerry); Ohio (52-48 Bush); New Hampshire (49-51 Kerry); and Florida (52-47 Bush) (and Alaska and Hawaii, but there are no results yet from either). That means that by the current reckoning, Bush has 210 dead and 66 possible and Kerry has 188 dead and 60 possible, with another 7 votes going who-knows-where. It’s all very much up in the air: anything can happen. But both Florida and Ohio look in the bag for Bush, which is vital.

I’m worried sick that the electorate have made the wrong decision, but so far it’s too early to tell. I hate democratic government: give me hereditary rule any day of the week. We’d know the next king from the day he was born.

The first snow of this season fell tonight. The world is beautiful under its blanket of white.

I’ve recently created a gallery of my 15th century Italian clothing; here are the pictures currently in it. There’s more information about the clothing itself on the page.

Donald Rumsfled strongly denounces the lie that a draft is planned. The leftists who spread it should be ashamed of themselves. But, of course, they won’t be—for they have no knowledge of shame, nor the self-awareness to feel it.

I just discovered this excellent defence of the Electoral College. It explains why the College plays an important role in guaranteeing the stability of our republic.

The Register has sponsored a comprehensive comparison of Windows and Linux security, and has posted a brief summary as well. The upshot is that Linux—while imperfect—is much more secure than Windows.

Years ago I started work on travtrack, a database editor for the excellent game known as Traveller; my basic idea was to create a program which would generate star systems per the GURPS Traveller rules (the ones in GURPS Traveller: First In, the supplement dealing with the Interstellar Scout Service). Of course, a generator which doesn't give one the chance to manipulate the generated data’s not very useful, and so I had to write a GUI to display it. The project also server as a learning exercise for me, but a long while ago I ran out of free time to play with it (the latest release of travlib was on the fifth of May 2003; the latest release of travtrack was the eighth of June 2002).

Well, I recently got back into it and as a project decided to try rewriting it in Python. It’s coming along amazingly well: I have a screenshot of the subsector editor available on the travtrack screenshots page.

There is a registry of Linux users available; approximately 145,000 users are currently registered. If you run Linux, be certain to register, in order to help contribute to accurate statistics gathering.

The Periodic Table of Perl Operators. Egad—I used to write a lot of Perl, but it has increasingly grown insane; now I’m a Python guy.

Caml appears to be an interesting programming language. Programs written therein are supposed to be strictly verified for a whole slew of potential bugs—and thus they are apparently much more reliable than those written in other languages. That’s the theory, anyway.

Inferno is a cool little OS, the child of the old Plan 9, which itself was a kind of Unix-done-right. It runs anywhere (atop Plan 9, Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X), or on its own. Apparently it unifies networking into the OS in a way which no-one else has yet done. Supposed to be mondo capable.

FeedBurner provides RSS & Atom newsfeed services. Looks like it can be a nice solution if you need to proxy your feed, or if you’d like to filter it somehow (e.g. they can toss in Amazon Associate program links and the like). I’ve added a new FeedBurner feed for Octopodial Chrome, just to play with it.

I recently discovered the Great Computer Language Shootout, a very cool collection of benchmarks for various programming languages. My one quibble is that the guy normalises the results to a ten-point scale, when a twelve-point would be superior. Other than that, quite slick.

Jed Babbin reports that it appears that there was a mutiny by US soldiers in Tallil on the 13th, but that the US Army doesn’t appear to be treating it with the gravity it merits.

In the 1840s Lieutenant (later Captain) Peter Alexander Halkett invented an India-rubber cloth cloak which could be inflated to form a boat. I found it whilst researching boat cloaks—my father recently made a remark which implied that there was a uniform boat cloak in the US Navy within living memory.

And actually, as Chapter Three, Section Five, Item Four of the US Navy Uniform Regulations specifies, there is still a boat cloak specified for male officers and chief petty officers. It is made of dark blue woolen fabric, three quarters of a circle, with a circular bent collar, and extending 2 inches below the kneecap; may be water repellent; [and] is closed at the neck with hooks and eyes and on the chest by one set of silk or mohair fasteners. It is to be worn with all fasteners closed.

I recently read an interesting story about Herbalife, a multi-level marketing thing. Folks, be extremely wary of MLM: almost no-one makes any money; most distributors have lost money on the deal.

Robin is a desktop-like interface coded in XUL which runs on Firefox. It is, quite frankly, incredible. Imagine where this could lead in half-a-dozen years…

Saw an interesting aside in an article by Peter Augustine Lawler: fertility rates are associated with support for Bush. Indeed, if those states which went with Gore in 2000 were to secede, they would have the same ruinously low birthrate and rapidly aging population as France.

Quite intriguing. I believe that in two centuries the suicide by infertility currently being committed in Europe will be looked back on as one of the more absurd fads in history.

This is the kind of racist filth spewing forth from the American Left these days. It turns the stomach. Can one possibly imagine a conservative penning such an abominable piece of trash?

According to Chinese lore, Wan Hu attempted to go into space in about 1500. Apparently, his spacecraft was built around a sturdy chair, two kites and 47 of the largest gunpowder-filled rockets he could lay his hands on. His servants lit the fuses, and there was a very loud bang, and no more Wu. One likes to think that just maybe he did shoot off into the heavens…

Years ago I started working on a suite of Traveller™-related software; I haven’t really touched it in over a year, but after reviewing the GNOME developer documentation I am newly inspired (plus, I’m growing tired of all the sewing I’ve been doing on my cloak). Perhaps I’ll be able to actually get a working piece of software done sometime before I die.

I have found a most interesting article on the structure of churches, one of the theses of which is that a mediæval church would have more closely resembled an Orthodox church—this is only natural, since at the time they had not fallen as far from the truth as they have since. A good read and quick.

The SCA is often accused of being ahistorical—and not always unjustly. However, as the Rules for Submissions to the College of Heralds demonstrate, there are strong attempts to avoid and correct this in certain quarters. The heralds are doing their best to ensure historical practise in their realm of influence. Now if only we could get everyone to play ball…

The Ansari X Prize has been won by the SpaceShip One team. Civilian space flight is coming, slowly but surely. I expect that it will be several decades before it really comes into its own, but this is wonderful news. I wonder how many centuries it’ll be before we figure out some form of faster-than-light travel.

We all know the stuff about not torturing POWs and allowing Red Cross visits, but there are some lesser-known provisions of the Geneva Convention. Isn’t that more properly called that Geneva Conventions anyway?

Well, I attended the Great American Beer Festival for the fifth year running, the difference with past years being that I served as the designated driver. This was an interesting experience—I’ve never actually been the DD.

The festival’s great theme this year seemed to be bourbon-barrel beers—that is, beers which have been aged in old bourbon casks. They all looked quite fine. There was also an interesting blended beer made with beer from three different Colorado breweries; my buddy enjoyed it so much that he ended the night with a glass thereof. I’d have like to have tried that.

As with last year’s festival, there was really quite an amazing number of extraordinarily attractive women there. My buddy kept asking if he was just suffering from a massive case of beer goggles—and I kept assuring him that such was certainly not the case. I don’t know what it is about beer attracting attractive gals, but I certainly do appreciate it.

Next year!

My brother just got back from the Navy’s survival & evasion school, and apparently the big thing now is to google a fellow’s name in order to get information about him. He is thus concerned that I note him my name on my personal page and this blog. Well, he need worry no longer: he will no longer be known on these pages by his given name, but as Tim. Personally, I think it’s all just a bit silly, but if Tim wants to change his name, I’m glad to oblige him. I do love by brother Tim.

His name’s Tim, you see…

The new Yorker, of all things, recently had an article about the fact that the vast majority of voters are ignorant. Only about 10% of the population actual has a political belief system; 42% vote on self-interest; 25% vote on whether times are good or bad; and 22% vote on random factors—factors like how rainy or dry it is!

We need to limit the vote. My preference is for something like a checklist: if one meets X out of Y criteria, one is allowed to vote. My checklist would probably include items like: head of household composed of four or more persons; college graduate; owner of four or more acres of land; make more than the median income; thirty years of age. I’d also limit households to a single vote.

An Alaskan mom is encouraging big game hunters to donate the organs of their kills to school science classes. I love America!

Grace is a cool little graphing tool. It can’t do 3D plots like gnuplot can, but its 2D plots appear a bit nicer.

Reading about Intellectual Morons, a new book out by Chris Benscu, I discovered that he runs OrthodoxNet, a resource for Orthodox Christians. I also happen to know that a writer for National Review Online is Orthodox. Slowly but surely our voices are being heard…

Russ Nelson has noted that compulsory schooling must go. He makes good points in his comments, and more elsewhere.

Help encourage use of the best web browser out there. Firefox: in your heart, you know it’s right.

Anyone who has viewed much XML knows how brain-shatteringly verbose it is. Although this is understandable given its goals, it means that trying to write XML by hand is not at all a pleasant task—and for many applications, XML must be written by hand or not at all. Fortunately, because it was meant to be easily machine-parsed and -generated, one can write in another language which is then mapped into XML. PXSL is one such language, and looks to be quite a bit easier to use. As an example, here is an excerpt from my FOAF file:

<rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
      xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/"
      xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"
      xmlns:bio="http://purl.org/vocab/bio/0.1/"
      xmlns:rel="http://purl.org/vocab/relationship"
      xmlns:wot="http://xmlns.com/wot/0.1/">

<!-- digital signature for this file -->
<rdf:Description rdf:about="">
     <wot:assurance rdf:resource="foaf.rdf.asc" />
</rdf:Description>

<foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="">
  <foaf:maker rdf:nodeID="me"/>
  <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:nodeID="me"/>
  <admin:generatorAgent rdf:resource="http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic"/>
  <admin:errorReportsTo rdf:resource="mailto:leigh@ldodds.com"/>
</foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>

<foaf:Person rdf:nodeID="me">
<foaf:name>Robert Uhl</foaf:name>
<foaf:gender>male</foaf:gender>
<foaf:title>Mr.</foaf:title>
<foaf:givenname>Robert</foaf:givenname>
<foaf:family_name>Uhl</foaf:family_name>
<foaf:nick>Bob</foaf:nick>
<foaf:mbox>ruhl+web@latakia.dyndns.org</foaf:mbox>
<foaf:mbox_sha1sum>4df3158a6b5a7261092e824203e7f1d1a34c8dd0</foaf:mbox_sha1sum><!-- latakia -->

Apparently, in PXSL this could be written as:

rdf:RDF -xmlns=<<http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>> \
        -xmlns:rdfs=<<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>> \
        -xmlns:foaf=<<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>> \
        -xmlns:admin=<<http://webns.net/mvcb/>> \
        -xmlns:geo=<<http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>> \
        -xmlns:bio=<<http://purl.org/vocab/bio/0.1/>> \
        -xmlns:rel=<<http://purl.org/vocab/relationship>> \
        -xmlns:wot=<<http://xmlns.com/wot/0.1/>>
  -- digital signature for this file
  rdf:Description -rdf:about=<<>>
    wot:assurance -rdf:resource=<<foaf.rdf.asc>>

  foaf:PersonalProfileDocument -rdf:about=<<>>
    foaf:maker -rdf:nodeID=<<me>>
    foaf:PrimaryTopic -rdf:nodeID=<<me>>
    admin:generatorAgent \
        -rdf:resource=<<http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic>>
    admin:errorReportsTo -rdf:resource=<<mailto:leigh@ldodds.com>>

  foaf:Person -rdf:nodeID=<<me>>
    foaf:name <<Robert Uhl>>
    foaf:gender <<male>>
    foaf:title <<Mr.>>
    foaf:givenname <<Robert>>
    foaf:family_name <<Uhl>>
    foaf:nick <<Bob>>
    foaf:mbox <<ruhl+web@latakia.dyndns.org>>
    foaf:mbox_sha1sum <<4df3158a6b5a7261092e824203e7f1d1a34c8dd0>> -- latakia

Granted, the above is still Greek without the proper technical knowledge—but it’s much less painful Greek to write. There are even features for macros, code generation and the rest which help make PXSL a much more concise and readable language than XML is.

The Internet Movie Database is a highly useful project for researching movies, actors & the like: among its features are ratings of films on a ten-point scale. One problem, though, is that ratings are not distributed normally: a movie rated 5 is below average. Well, there is now an IMDB Decoder Ring which solves all that for one. The fellow performs some good statistical analysis of the data, and comes up with this table:

Pretty nice little tool.

R is a language for manipulating statistical data, and is very useful for folks in fields where this matters. It’s free software, which is important: it means that one has the freedoms to run it; to study it; to copy it; and to improve it. For those familiar with statistics, R is similar to S (which was developed at Bell Labs).

IBM developerWorks have a good Introduction to Statistical Programming with R available.

GNU Octave is a cool numerical package which is more-or-less compatible with MATLAB. It’s very cool if one has need of that kind of thing.

Neal Boortz has some ideas on how to limit the vote. What about requiring that one be able to identify the President, Vice President, one’s two Senators and congressman? That’s fair. What about giving votes in proportion to taxes paid? After all, if one pays more for something one should get more, no?

A buddy at work sent me a link to a scanned-in & OCRed edition of Devil’s Guard, a supposed memoir written by a German soldier who joined the French Foreign Legion after the Second World War and was shipped off to Indochina. I’ve no idea if it’s authentic (I must admit I’ve my doubts), but it is a ripping good yarn.

Saw this making its rounds through email…

• Clinton awards Halliburton no-bid contract in Yugoslavia—good…
  Bush awards Halliburton no-bid contract in Iraq—bad
• Clinton spends 77 billion on war in Serbia—good…
  Bush spends 87 billion in Iraq—bad
• Clinton imposes regime change in Serbia—good…
  Bush imposes regime change in Iraq—bad
• Clinton bombs Christian Serbs on behalf of Muslim Albanian terrorists—good…
  Bush liberates 25 million from a genocidal dictator—bad
• Clinton bombs Chinese embassy—good…
  Bush bombs terrorist camps—bad
• Clinton commits felonies while in office—good…
  Bush lands on aircraft carrier in jumpsuit—bad
• No mass graves found in Serbia—good…
  No WMD found Iraq—bad
• Stock market crashes in 2000 under Clinton—good…
  Economy on upswing under Bush—bad
• Clinton refuses to take custody of Bin Laden—good…
  World Trade Centers fall under Bush—bad
• Clinton says Saddam has nukes—good…
  Bush says Saddam has nukes—bad
• Clinton calls for regime change in Iraq—good…
  Bush imposes regime change in Iraq—bad
• Terrorist training in Afghanistan under Clinton—good…
  Bush destroys training camps in Afghanistan—bad
• Milosevic not yet convicted—good…
  Saddam turned over for trial—bad

Ahh, it’s so confusing!

Anyone who follows energy prices knows that they’re not going down; in fact, natural gas prices have doubled over the last two years (and due to political opposition to nuclear and practical opposition to coal, almost every new power plant is powered by, you guessed it, natural gas).

Years ago environmentalists were trumpeting the advantages of fluorescent light bulbs which were bulky, didn’t fit every lamp, didn’t produce enough light and which were economically unsound (spending $20 to save $5 is stupid). Times have changed, though: whilst at Costco today I found compact fluorescents—the size as incandescent bulbs—for $1.75 apiece. The package advertised savings of $56 per bulb, over the lifetime of the bulb (advertised at nine years) at an electricity price of $3.51/therm (12¢/kilowatt-hour); my actual electricity price is $2.41/therm, so it works out to saving $38.35 over nine years; while this doesn’t account for the fact that the bulbs are almost certain not to last the rated nine years, it also doesn’t account for the fact that electricity prices are bound to rise as well.

That works out to a savings per year of $4.26; given that the bulbs cost $1.75 and assuming that I simply replace my existing incandescents, that means the bulbs pay for themselves in five months.

So I bought them—how good are they, really? Well, I will admit that they are somewhat dimmer than I would like: these are 15 watt bulbs (replacing 60 watt bulbs), and I rather think that 16–18 watts would have been better. They’re actually quite a bit easier on the eyes, though—and my bathroom seems brighter than before (possibly they reinforce one another better than incandescents do, if it’s possible for there to be a difference). Also, there is about a half-second delay for the lights to come on: unlike incandescents, they don’t come on immediately. I think all in all they’re worth every penny: so long as they last at least as long as a normal light bulb, they use ¼ the electricity.

I’m buying another package the next time I go to Costco.

We all knew John Kerry has oodles of money—who knew that he’d this kind of cash?

Today I built myself a wooden chest. For a first piece, it’s not too bad—albeit not too good either. It should come in handy when I go camping. I’ll be sanding & staining it tomorrow; I hope to take pictures then.

An acquaintance had forwarded A View from the Eye of the Storm (alternate site), an interesting piece which I mostly agreed with. My one bit of disagreement was on preëmptive strikes. The Isrælis love this sort of thing, but I’m not so certain.

What we currently have are two models of dealing with problems: the police and the military. The one is inward-directed and thus prone to abuse, and because of this is highly circumscribed: we worry about due process, chains of evidence, presumption of innocence and the rest; the other is outward-directed, and thus safer (for us; obviously it’s very dangerous for everyone else) and therefor less circumscribed: no sane man argues that an enemy soldier should be arrested and tried, presuming that he does not support his side, and only fought until a jury of his peers have found that he does, in fact, support his state. Preëmptive actions are necessary in war, but absolutely anathema to police work (imagine if the police arrested everyone between the ages of 13 and 24, on the grounds that the vast majority will have used drugs and alcohol illegally). Indeed, the greatest threat the civil authorities pose to our liberties comes precisely when the police entertain delusions that they are soldiers.

But terrorism of the al-Qaedist sort is something altogether unamenable to either model. It would be suicidal to wait for terrorists to attack, then try to hunt down and punish them (the civil model); but it would be a great imposition on liberty (and practically unworkable) to proceed on a military model, imposing martial law, sentencing American citizens to death without trials and the rest. What is needed is an approach which splits the difference. I’m not certain what that approach would involve, but I do think that it would have certain key characteristics.

First of all, it would need to be preëmptive. In an age when a few thousand dollars’ worth of plane tickets can kill thousands and destroy millions of dollars of property and cause billions of dollars of damage to the economy, terrorist acts must be nipped in the bud. There needs to be a branch of the government (the FBI within the US; the CIA without) which attempts to penetrate terrorist cells and foil attempts before they happen. We cannot let a dirty bomb be detonated in Washington, DC; we cannot allow anthrax to be released in New York City (loathe as I am to admit it, Yankees haven’t been the enemy for a bit under a century; I am on their side and they are on mine: we are all Americans); we cannot permit poisons or drugs to contaminate our water supplies. Much of this can be solved with ordinary civil means—but not all of it can be. What if, say, it were discovered that bin Laden is holed up in Iowa—calling out the local sheriff isn’t the right thing to do. Maybe it would be appropriate to send a group of SEALs (or Rangers, or whatever) to kill or capture him.

Secondly, we need to remember that with great power comes great responsibility. If we empower someone to conduct military operations on American soil, we need some way to ensure that his power is not abused. No-one sane wants a system whereby the President, or a governor, or a mayor, or Sgt. Billy Bob, can sign a piece of paper and declare that Mrs. Murphy is a terrorist, authorising that she be killed ASAP. We need some procedure whereby any extraordinary operations are justified—and if not justified, that those responsible are appropriately punished. I would not be opposed to execution of someone who mistakenly authorised an operation which killed an innocent.

Lastly, we need to set some well-defined limits on counter-terrorism. We need judicial review of some sort, not as lax as a civil court but not as strict as a military tribunal. We need to figure out how to structure things such that no politician, no soldier, no intelligence officer, no-one is likely to be able to abuse the system. I don’t agree with the folks who claim that the Guantanamo Bay captives are being wrongfully held—but imagine if US citizens, captured in the US, were being held in the same way.

Above all, we need transparency—which is damned difficult given that rolling up a terrorist cell requires secrecy. The entire endeavour requires a massive balancing act, but the alternatives are tyranny or destruction.

I am so glad I don’t live on the coast anymore: hurricanes can be brutal.

Yesterday at a business meeting one of my colleagues expressed shock that I had graduated but four years ago; this morning one of my neighbours was amazed that I’m yet 26. In years past, folks have thought me my kid brother’s father, and even now many think the picture of my dear brother as a midshipman (which sits on my desk) is me in some fancied previous military career.

When I was younger, I enjoyed being thought older than my years; it was useful when I attended Old Dominion University at the tender age of 13; it was a lifesaver when I was 19 and trying to buy beer; it’s a damned nuisance now that I am old enough to do most anything save serve in elected office or be ordained a priest. Last year a woman thought I was 35—a full decade older than I was at the time! I’m a young man; I’m not middle-aged. Why can’t anyone see that?

I wonder if this might not be a (perhaps minor) part of why I’ve such trouble finding a girlfriend: every girl I’m interested in thinks I’m such creepy old guy.

I don’t know if my apparent advanced years help or hinder me at work. On the one hand, perhaps I come across as more mature; on the other, perhaps folks wonder why I’ve not the knowledge and experience one would expect from a man with one foot in the grave.

For years I wanted to appear older than I was, and was pretty successful at it; now I just want to be me, and I’m failing miserably. How does one seem one’s age?

Those who consider National Review to be composed of a bunch of fuddy-duddies might wish to read John J. Miller’s latest—on Iron Maiden’s Powerslave.

The Killian forgeries are not the only fraud Dan Rather has (perhaps unknowingly) been involved with: Anne Morse reveals that in 1988 he broadcast interviews with veterans telling lies about their service.

There’s a new search engine out there: Vivisimo. It seems to have a bit more intelligence about figuring out what one is looking for, and has a nice feature whereby it displays a selection of possible sub-categories. It is somewhat slower than Google.

Ever wanted to make a mediæval chandelier? They're remarkably simple, as this chandelier page demonstrates. The main furniture page of that same site has some other wonderful resources and well-researched articles on historical furniture.

Well, my latest copy of the Austin College alumni rag brought sad news indeed: Luckett Hall was knocked to the ground. They claimed that it was a tough decision, but the reality is that the current administration hated the thing for years. Sure, it was a disgusting pit (Luckett’s where the jocks tended to live), but it was a disgusting pit with character, which is more than I can say for the man who single-handedly sucked all the life out of the school.

So much has changed in the past four years that I fear I might not recognise the old campus if I saw it again. When I remember what it was like in 1996, and when I consider what it has been made to become, I weep.

Coral is a distribution network meant to help distribute the load of a commonly-accessed site. Anyone who reads Slashdot is familiar with the effect of a slashdotting, when tens or hundreds of thousands of users hit a website all at once, pounding its servers and destroying its internet connexion. Well, Coral fixes that: instead of linking to http://foo.net/, link to http://foo.net.nyud.net:8090/.

So if anyone likes Octopodial Chrome enough to forward one of my pieces to Slashdot or elsewhere, do be kind enough to use the link provided:-)

Reading an article on fats & heart disease, I found that saturated fats are good, polyunsaturated fats can be bad, and trans fatty acids are evil incarnate. Guess what’s margarine, shortening and partially hydrogenated soybean oil are: trans fatty acids. Butter, lard or palm oil and coconut oil are the healthy alternatives. Tee, I say, hee.

And I get so much guff from my relatives for using lard (I bought one tub of the stuff, four years ago and am still using it) and butter in my cooking. It turns out that my prejudice against man-made products is good: trans fatty acids are very rare in nature, but very common in the lab. I stand vindicated!

Saw a great article on kitchen knives on the Cooking for Engineers site. Every home cook should read it. Probably most folks already knew all this stuff, but I didn’t, and now do.

I just saw an ad for the Wisconson-based Brandt’s Cheese Haus. Their prices appear remarkably reasonable—I’ll have to order something and see what their quality is like. They also ship beer to Colorado!

I saw a Google AdWord for the Fee Brothers site, and had to take a look. They’ve a nice history of the firm there: apparently the first Fee came over from Ireland in 1835, and his four sons founded the firm which today makes a whole range of drinks-related products. They are most well-known for their famous Orange Bitters, the secret ingredient to a perfect martini.

Michael Chu hosts Cooking for Engineers, a blog dedicated to a techie’s view of cooking. He has a nice visual shorthand indicating the proper procedure for the steps to follow. Very cool—poor fellow has been slashdotted and seen his bandwidth consumption sky-rocket, so please be kind enough to follow a few of his ads.

The Monkeysphere is a most amusing article. Caution: contains crude language; kids (and adults of delicate sensibilities) stay home.

Ben Shapiro points out that while Bush gets the rep for being inarticulate, Kerry’s no slouch on that score either. The story’s much the same with Dan Quayle vs. John Edwards: Quayle had much more experience than Edwards has, but he got the rep as a young rube whilst Edwards needn’t worry. It must be nice to run for office with the backing of the news media.

Stephen Bloch (aka John Elys) has written the fine What the SCA is Not, which looks at re-enactment, living history, re-creation and experimental archæology, and whether or not the Society for Creative Anachronism meets the definitions.

For my own part, I’d say that it’s definitely not re-enactment or living history (although sometimes some people manage a bit of the latter), can be good re-creation and at its best can be experimental archæology.

Back in the Second World War our troops were issues A Short Guide to Iraq (PDF facsimile, I’m afraid); it’s remarkable how much of it almost certainly applies today. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Quite an amusing read, really.

John Taylor Gotto, a New York public school teacher who has received several awards for teaching, has published his Underground History of American Education online. It’s reputed to be an insightful look at the purpose of modern American education: turning out obedient factory workers.

Paul Kengor reveals that Democrats get a free pass on religion. Clinton mentioned Christ 5.1 times a year; Bush has mentioned Him 4.7 times a year. Clinton’s invocations of God have often been highly partisan; to my knowledge, Bush’s have not so been. It would not surprise me were something similar to hold for Kerry.

Andrew Olmstead puts forth the argument regarding the election. In a nutshell: Badnarik is a loon; Nader is a thief; Bush is a socialist; Kerry is a loon, a thief and a socialist. The least of these evils is Bush (he of the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold Act; he of the unconstitutional No Child Left Behind Act), and thus one is honour-bound to vote for the man.

Beloit College have released their Mindset List for the Class of 2008. Those entering college this year never had to watch an ad for Zamfir and his thrice-accursed panpipes, the lucky bastards. I did find item 43 odd—I don’t remember ærodromes lacking security systems. It must have been wonderful back then.

It seems that Canadian and Swedish studies have demonstrated that the number of wars has decreased recently. And here I was thinking that President Bush is a nasty warmonger. Could it be that his harsh attitude towards disturbing the peace has led folks to stop disturbing it?

Maggie Forest has written a brilliant article on tunics. Based on cemetery finds, she has devised a pattern which uses very little fabric, is comfortable and looks pretty sharp. The key is to recognise that fabric is and always has been rather expensive: wasting it is ridiculous. The only changes I make is that I add gussets (a triangle front and back) underneath the arms, and remove the centre front and rear skirt gussets.

Just read an exceedingly interesting article entitled The Green Gardens of Cordoba; it concerns the tendency of Mohammedan culture to look back, not forward.

They dream of going back to the 1400s, not because those were better times, per se, but because those were the years when Islam and Arabic culture were, in their eyes at least, dominant.

But it’s interesting that they do not project this dream forward into the future. They dream of going back to Cordoba. They don’t, at least obviously, dream of going forward into a better future where Islam and Arabs are dominant. They seek to undo, to revert to, to somehow recover, not to make new, not to build upon the foundations of or improve upon the reality that exists.

He makes a very good point.

I saw on Walter in Denver (a cool libertarian blog) that the DEA returned marijuana-growing equipment they had seized from a medical marijuana patient. It’s reputed to be the first time in history that the DEA has returned seized goods. We may be at a turning point in Drug Prohibition.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute (aka the last, best hope of freedom in our time) has an interesting article on the economic condition of Gilligan’s Isle. Most interesting.

Today at work we’d one of our so-called Town Hall meetings (really, an all-hands meeting for everyone in Denver & the surrounding areas). The speaker was our employer’s vice president in charge of diversity. What, one might ask, is diversity?

Why, it is giving funds to black student associations, and Hispanic student associations, and Asian student associations, and women’s student associations, and creating gay/bisexual/transsexual student associations. It’s funding summer camps for girls, to encourage them in a subject they are highly unlikely to excel in (rather than investing the money where it’s likely to yield a far, far, far better return on investment). It’s funding special opportunities for cripples (not in itself a particularly objectionable thing, although as a stockholder I wonder how it increases my holdings). It’s installing footbaths for Mohammedans.

The message that I took away is that my noble employer has no use for me. After all, it spends an absurd amount of money trying to attract everyone but those like me. Apparently, we spend not a single penny on those of my own sort: white able-bodied males interested in girls and worshipping the true God.

I am not against equal opportunity: in fact, I am a strong proponent of picking the best candidate for the job. When it comes to business, I really don’t care what my co-workers do in their free time: that’s their own business. I want to know that those who work alongside me are the absolute best that money can buy—I don’t care what race they are, what sex they are, what God they worship, whom they find attractive, which of their body parts fail to work, what they ingest when they’re not working, which political party they vote for or anything else unrelated to our common goal.

What I am against is unreasonable discrimination. My employer discriminates against whites: I cannot imagine it ever funding a White Engineers’ Association. My employer discriminates against men: I cannot imagine it ever funding a Male Engineers’ Association. My employer discriminates against heterosexuals: I cannot imagine it ever funding a Heterosexual Engineers’ Association. My employer discriminates against Christians: while it allows Mohammedans to conduct their prayers on-site, I cannot imagine it ever allowing Christians to pray the Divine Office at work.

All this would be forgivable if there were a business reason. But I don’t see it. Business sense is hiring the best candidate—it’s throwing money down a hole. I’m fairly certain that East Asians don’t need too much encouragement to enter the sciences, and I’m as certain that it’s a waste of money trying to encourage the vast majority of women to enter the same (although I’ll admit that I know some extraordinarily intelligent gals—much smarter than am I—in the sciences, they are statistical outliers). Men are most emphatically not equal in ability: some of us are good at one thing; some at others. That’s why Africans tend to excel in certain kinds of running; that’s what East Asians excel in certain professions; that’s why women predominate in other careers—and yes, that’s why some jobs are almost entirely staffed by guys like me. We all have our fortes; to deny someone an opportunity because of his colour or sex is wrong, but to waste resources barking up the wrong tree is just foolish.

Yes, yes—we’ve all seen the Apple Product Cycle in action, from System 8, to the first iMac, to System 9, to OS X, to the Ugly iMac, to the iPod, and now to the New iMac. A very funny little page.

I live over a mile away from Fiddler’s Green, and tonight there’s what I’ll generously term a concert featuring Linkin Park, Korn, Snoop Dogg, The Used and Less than Jake. The bastards are playing so loudly that it sounds as though someone is blasting his radio outside my door. What possible reason can there be for playing music that loudly? And why the hell are they allowed to do it when some of us are trying to fall asleep?

OTOH, it is kinda cool that they are able to amplify one twit’s voice so greatly that he may be heard more than a mile away. Now if we’d only use that power for good…

We’ve a few Exchange admins at work this week for a special project (for those of you outside the technorati, Microsoft Exchange is a mail server). One of them dropped by my cube because he was interested in the software I use to relay mail (it, too, is a mail server—I’ve just configured it to pass on mail rather than holding onto it). So I gave him a quick overview of the commands I use to see how many messages are sitting in the queue, to count the number of probably spams, and to track the progress of a message through the system, from arrival, through processing and to departure to its final destination.

The look on his face was priceless. Stunned, he said something along the lines of Now I understand why you guys love Unix so much; it’d have taken us twenty minutes to do that, and with no guarantee of the correct result. It had taken me something rather less than a minute.

Yes, Unix has a bit of a learning curve, but once learnt it is part of one’s being, and its capabilities are tools which lie ready for one’s hand. All useful skills require a bit of learning, but the payoff is worth it.

For those who are curious, mailq is a command which prints out a list of the messages currently queued up, whom they’re from, whom they’re to & their status, and finally prints the number of messages sitting in the queue & the number of bytes their contents sum to. tail is another command which shows the end of a file (its tail, you see); so I simply typed mailq | tail -1, which shows the very last line of the output from mailq.

Since I know that a message sitting in the queue for MAILER-DAEMON is probably a bounce from a spam (genuine MAILER-DAEMON messages are almost always delivered instantaneously), I just search the output of mailq for the string MAILER-DAEMON. Fortunately enough, there is a Unix command to search for things: the general regular expression parser (which can do much more complex things than look for a particular string, of course), or grep, so I can run mailq | grep MAILER-DAEMON and see only those lines which contain that string. Of course, that’s not overly useful—I don’t really care to see them; I just wish to count them. There is another command, wc, which counts the number of characters, words and lines in a file (the name comes from word count), so all I need to do is run mailq | grep MAILER-DAEMON | wc -l (the -l tells wc that I just want the line count, not the rest of the info); since each line corresponds to a single message, I know the number of messages. So now I know how many messages there are for MAILER-DAEMON, and I know that messages for MAILER-DAEMON sitting in the queue are almost certainly undeliverable bounces from spams, I know how many of the messages in queue are likely to be caused by spam.

Likewise, when tracing the progress of a message through the system, I just have to examine the logs. They’re simple text files which I can search with grep, perhaps looking for the address of the sender or the recipient—from that found line I can get the ID of the message, and from that I can search the logs for only those lines pertaining to that message. I can see it arrive; I can see the mail server (postfix, a truly excellent bit of software) pass it back-and-forth as it determines where it needs to go & examines it to see whether it might be spam, and I can see it leave.

All these examples use standard bits of the Unix toolkit. Unix was first used for word processing, and those text-oriented tools make searching through system logs dead simple. Since a large portion of a sysadmin’s work involves examining logs, that means that Unix makes my job dead simple.

I pity those yoked with lesser systems.

Diana West points out that while Bush is castigated for continuing to read to children for six or seven minutes, Franklin D. Roosevelt spent 18 minutes doing nothing—and Kerry spent half an hour in shock, by his own account. My own thought is that this doesn’t matter. The President needed some time to collect his thoughts and consider the implications: the landscape had changed, and he needed to think about it. Why not spend that time reading to kids? All in all, that was probably the most quiet time he got all day, and I daresay he pondered the issues well during that time. Reading to kids hardly taxes one’s mental skills.

Today I’d the opportunity to shoot sporting clays with a fellow-parishioner. Much, much, much more difficult than simply shooting skeet. The clays can come from several directions: underneath one; crossing right-to-left, or left-to-right; towards one, and rolling along the ground like a jackrabbit. The intent is to give one practise in hunting: the choice of which clay is shot is up to the guy controlling things, and thus the shooter must be alert and keep his eyes open.

The problem was that the cross-wise clays were apparently a lot closer than they looked, and one needed to lead them by quite a bit. We were both quite unused to having to lead (despite my shooting-partner’s hunting experience), and as we didn’t know we needed to lead, we were driven nearly crazy. It was the worst shooting I’ve done in my life. Then, when we settling up the fees, the range officer mentioned the bit about the trajectory being closer than it appeared.

News we could have used.

Oh well—it was great fun anyway. It’s always great fun to go shooting. And now I’ve something else to practise at, for this fall I plan to be the king of the field.

Tim Dawson, who is himself often an intelligent & thoughtful critic of the Society for Creative Anachronism, has addresses some of the critiques of the SCA made by others.

Today we’ve a low of 48° & and a high of but 57°; and yet, Sunday is predicted to be in the 80s. It’s August and I’ve worn a sweater not once, but twice!

I could grow to like this.

Victor Davis Hanson has written perhaps the most thoughtful reflection on Kerry’s service I have read. He neither condemns nor applauds, but simply notes that the present situation could have been avoided. Well worth reading.

Most folks have become familiar with the term wiki, referring to a user-edited website; Wikipedia is a well-known example of a free example (I myself have contributed to pages on less and myself); well, there is a related effort known as Wikibooks whose effort is to develop free textbooks. Perhaps I should add my bachelor recipes to it, in the recipes section.

Steve Sailer has written that the widespread practise of marrying first or second cousins may explain the Iraqi and Middle Eastern situations. His thesis is that it tends to encourage family feelings at the expense of patriotism, and that does make a certain sense: when one’s family is bound to one by multiple lines of descent, and all of one’s extended family is trusted by, or at least well-known to, one then that could indeed be the case. Interesting that nearly half of all Iraqi marriages are to a cousin. No wonder they’re so bloody backward.

TeX by Topic is now available as a PDF on the web, directly from the author. Very cool.

Most folks don’s know this nowadays, but one of the first production uses of Unix was as a writer’s tool. The typesetter used back then was called troff—a rather arcane and often odd little language which did its job nonetheless. roff is still used as the format for the man (short for manual) pages which remain the bedrock of Unix documentation.

Last night I discovered Peter Flynn’s excellent Formatting information, A beginner’s introduction to typesetting with LaTeX. It looks like a valuable introduction to the only way to format text.

The NSA budgets more for electricity in a year than the entire state of Maryland. Wow.

Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece, In the Beginning was the Command Line, is available online these days.

Conrad Taylor wonder what WYSIWYG typesetting has done to the typesetter’s art—and the answer’s not pretty. From 1996, but as true today as it was then.

As everyone knows, LaTeX is the absolute best text formatting system ever created, ever. Well, Getting Started with TeX on Mac OS X tries to ease one into the strange universe of text markup. As I’ve mentioned, LaTeX is where it’s at.

All I can say about TeX is this:

Knuth says that TeX is for producing beautiful documents, and he went to great lengths to build in a lot of typographic know-how. The hyphenation algorithm alone was the subject of a PhD thesis.

I credit LaTeX for my excellent grades as a senior in college. My writing hadn’t improved that much—’twas all the text formatting. Great beautiful margin, footnotes like God meant them to be mathematical equations Euler would kill for: LaTeX is where it’s at.

DigiBarn claims that working hypertext implementation was available in 1912. I rather think that they are pulling one’s leg, but OTOH I have read of 1930s-era fax machines, so who knows?

Or words to that effect. This morning we were informed that our account intends to terminate our contract in November. Personally, though, I figure that it’ll be closer to October, or possibly even late September. I’m confident that I’ll be able to find new work—still, it’s dashed annoying. This was my first real job, and I really hate change. Oh well.

Diane Dimond writes in Newsweek about her 78 year old, WWII veteran father being run through the indignity of æroport screening. She states of course we need to screen airplane passengers, but I disagree. Why should we screen free citizens of a free republic? Why shouldn’t we allow citizens to bear arms on a plane, just as our Second Amendment mandates? Let’s be frank: a citizenry afraid to defend itself deserves everything it gets. 11 September would never have happened—or rather, the impact would not have been so great—had more than 1 in 4 Americans been brave enough to stand up to violence and tyranny.

In 1996, at CU Boulder, Roger Ebert devised the Boulder Pledge:

Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.

I’ve taken the pledge; you should too.

Years ago, Peter Anspach compiled the Evil Overlord List, consisting of the top 100 things he’d do were he an evil overlord. Stuff like, I will not design my Main Control Room so that every workstation is facing away from the door, and when I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice. Brilliantly amusing.

And folks thought codpieces were a thing of the past. At least the historical variety were obviously fake (and thus a little humourous), and in fact served to further modesty, believe it or not. This is just sad.

Seen recently on Slashdot:

Phase 1

Uncritical Acceptance

Phase 2

Wild Enthusiasm

Phase 3

Dejected Disillusionment

Phase 4

Total Confusion

Phase 5

Search for the Guilty

Phase 6

Punishment of the Innocent

Phase 7

Promotion of Nonparticipants

Apparently it dates back to the ’70s. It’s true, too.

My brother Thomas’s good high school friend Mr. Conrad Layman was married to the former Miss Eli Quick last Saturday in Grand Lake, Colo. Here is a nice photo I was able to snap of the event (returning the favour Mrs. Layman did me at my own brother’s wedding):

A nice couple, no? I wish them all the luck in the world.

The Wedding Etiquette Hell site describes a plethora of horrid things which can happen at a wedding. Now that my brother & my sister-in-law are married, I can share this with the world—I’d no desire to scare them before the fact.

The always-interesting Cory Doctorow some time ago wrote an article arguing that metadata will be unsuccessful. His points are several:

Man Lies

His point is that folks will lie in their metadata, just as searching on an old-style search engine for just about any term these days turns up porn. True—but one of the cool things about RDF and the frameworks built upon it is that anyone can annotate anything, and thus I can choose to rank metadata providers, or choose someone else’s ranking. The trouble with in-page metadata was that it was provided by the author, who had incentive to lie; out-of-band metadata may be provided by anyone. Might there perhaps arise a market for metadata marketers, much as there’s a market for Consumer Reports? I can easily imagine it.

Man is Lazy

His point is that authors are unlikely to annotate their own pages. This is not quite true: already, there’s a blossoming market in search engine optimisation. Now, some of it is deceitful, but much of it is concerned with presenting a page such that a spider such as the Googlebot can easily understand it. It’s a small step from that to maintaining separate metadata.

Moreover, as I suggest above, it’s quite likely that there will arise a market in metadata. Yes, man is lazy—but there already exists a mechanism to get him working: it’s called a job.

Man is Stupid

Doctorow notes that on eBay and other such sites are rife with misspellings, and that this means that folks will not accurately categorise their data. As I noted above, there will be a market, and a market is an excellent mechanism for driving some minimal level of quality. Yeah, McDonald’s is not the greatest food in the world, but one is much less likely to contract typhoid from it than from food a century-and-a-half ago.

Mission: Impossible—Know Thyself

He notes that every man is a rotten judge of his own character. Well, duh. But others—especially the cumulative of others—are often pretty good at it. Solved, once again, by the market.

Schemas Aren’t Neutral

Doctorow points out that every producer will argue for a scheme of classification which represents his interests best, and denigrates those of his competitors most. Once again, he’s correct, but both in law and in finance we’ve somehow managed to overcome that to a very great deal. That’s part of the beauty of schemas which are created from the bottom up: driven by hackers such as those who brought us the World Wide Web in the first place, they become standards before any special interest can affect them over-much. Either that, or they are created from the consensus of those same interests. Whichever path they take, they tend to end up decent; those that don’t die off, once again due to market pressure.

Metrics Influence Results

His point here is that whatever we rate by tends to influence that which is rated, e.g. mandatory school testing leads to teaching to the test. His greater point is that it’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. Well, of course: I don’t doubt that there may be multiple competing schemas. Generally, that which delivers the most to the most will win. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be the best (see Windows), but it will be mostly sufficient (again, see Windows). But over time, it will improve (see Linux).

There’s More Than One Way to Describe Something

As he says, reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe something; true enough. Yet somehow we all manage to agree on traffic rules; and those of us who disagree (say, on the question of whether McDonald’s or Le Central affords one better food) somehow don’t come to blows over it: we form separate communities. Where reasonable men disagree, there may be a divergence of standards, but where we agree there will be uniformity. Isn’t that the ideal anyway?

It’s an interesting article, and his points are cogent, but I believe that in the long run they become irrelevant. Most of them are defeated once there is a market for metadata, and the rest are made minor over time.

FOAF is a project which attempts to create a machine-readable web of pages describing people, their interests and their inter-relationships. That is, I’d have my FOAF file, describing who I am, where I live, what I’m interested in and whom I know; those people could in turn have their own pages with the same. As the inter-connections between people grow, pretty one can see how many degrees of separation connect one and anyone else on earth.

FOAF is based on RDF, which is a standard for storing metadata (data about data)—the big win about this is that one can use various standard tools to create & manage it.

One interesting thing about FOAF is that one can use a single file to represent an entire database of information: the people I say I know are just more entries in my file, and I could specify (incompletely) whom they know and what kind of relationships they have with one another. For example, both my brother and my sister-in-law in my file; nothing prevents me from noting that: they are married to one another; each has met a few of my friends; and so on. If I’d one of Emily’s brothers in my FOAF file, I could note that they are siblings, and so on and so forth. Nothing stops me from populating more information about each of them, such as birthdays, interests, job &c.

Nothing except politeness. The general rule is that one should only reveal data about oneself; thus almost every entry in my file for anyone besides myself is minimal: full name and SHA-1-hashed email address (the addresses are hashed so that spammers cannot snarf them—a hash is a one-way encoding of a string: e.g. postmaster@irs.gov hashes to 7c44e262e4f3331dd5d7af5c571ad94794ec38bc; since each address hashes to a unique string, if I know who 84567345abc4375… really is, and you say you know him, then I know whom you know, but if I don’t, I can’t). The only exception I make is when the person-knows-person relationship is interesting: my brother Thomas has met my buddy Phil and his fiancée Jess, which is surprising and may help make for an interesting six-degrees inter-relationship. If Tom’s file notes that he’s met Admiral Stockdale, suddenly Phil & Jess are only two steps away from Stockdale, and three away from any number of presidents and politicians.

FOAF only addresses the simplest relationship: X knows Y. It doesn’t specify how well X knows Y, or even if Y knows X. For that, there is an additional relationship vocabulary which specifies things like siblingOf, worksWith, wouldLikeToKnow &c.

FOAF+relationships ends up being similar to XFN, but the two are actually different. FOAF is supposed to be encyclopædic, containing everyone one knows and to what degree (at least ideally); XFN only comes into play when one links. FOAF utilises RDF; XFN gets a free ride atop XHTML. FOAF addresses shared interests and locations; XFN’s primary goal is to provide information about whom one has met. The two are complementary ways of finding friends-of-friends and building a web of inter-relationships.

The easiest way to get started with FOAF is to use the FOAF-a-matic tool: it prompts for your name, title, email address, homepage, work & school homepages and a list of your friends and their names & emails; it then generates a FOAF file with all that information nicely encoded (and email addresses protected).

If you run a blog or other website, use XFN on all your links, as applicable. Create a FOAF file and link to it from your homepage like this: <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="/~ruhl/foaf.rdf" />. It’s the cool thing to do.

I recently added support for XFN, which is a way of indicating relationships with the people to whom one links (one’s blogroll, in the case of blogs). The links to my brothers, for example, indicate that they are my brothers and that we’ve met. Automated tools can spider this info and display one’s relationships with one’s friends, family &c.

Dennis Prager points out Gov. McGreevey’s brilliant use of the gay defence. Had a normal man had an affair with a woman and given her a security job for which she was eminently unsuited, he would be ridden out of town on a rail; but because he’s homosexual, that somehow excuses things. Likewise with Barney Frank: if a normal man had hired a call girl, and let her run a prostitution ring from his home, his political future would have been dim. Yet somehow these things are more forgivable when it’s homosexuals who err. Ridiculous.

Rich Lowry points out how General Tommy Franks’s new book gives the lie to the Bush-lied crowd. To believe that Bush lied, one must also believe that such men as King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt lied, at the military officers engaged in an elaborate ruse, making sub-optimal plans which purported to assume the existence of Iraqi WMDs.

I’m no very great fan of George Bush (the man is a socialist), but I do believe that he’s honest, and I think that he’s done about as well as can be expected.

You need Hamilton ’95, the OS of the future.

Kids annoyed 120,000 bees by throwing rocks at their 500-lb. hive. How droll—I used to do exactly that as a child, but even then I was smart enough not to assault a huge hive. Only got stung two or three times, too.

An unknown infantryman writes My War: Fear and Loathing in Iraq, a fascinating blog. Some of the events it chronicles are quite hard to imagine. Take a look.

David Adams has a capitalist defence of free software and makes some excellent points. Yes, the rise of free software means that proprietary software producers will suffer—but software consumers will benefit. The rise of the automobile was bad news for buggy whip manufacturers, but it was great news for shipping and for anyone who wanted to travel a good distance in a day. Do read the article.

After watching School of Rock last night, I came to a startling conclusion: my brother Tom is Jack Black, only with an eight of an inch of hair, no beard and a career as a naval aviator. Strange but true.

Lest I forget, I am the studliest of studs; the manliest of men. Why, for centuries—millennia, even—man’s constant study has been to try to achieve a slight fraction of the coolness I now possess. It must be tough to be another guy—for no other guy is me.

Why am I so keyed up? Yesterday, I asked a gal for her number, and she gave it to me. Granted, it might not be her number, but still… It’s the first time I ever asked, and I count any response but Hell, no! as a success:-)

Believe it or not, but Matha Stewart is useful. Her article on garlic greens proved that they are a useful ingredient.

Matthew Thomas has recently translated Some Account of Myself, which I noticed in and old blog entry of his. It’s a fascinating account of a man’s professional life, and quite valuable for giving a hint of how religious even Regency England could be. Read it.

Tony Blankley points out that if Unfit for Command is truthful, John Kerry has no business being President—but if it is false, it is a malicious libel. Either Kerry is a hero, or he is a poltroon. Either his (few) veterans are telling the truth, and the 254 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are bald-faced liars—or his veterans are bald-faced liars and the SBVT are telling the truth; there really is no middle ground.

Mustafa Akyol argues that the murder of civilians or execution of POWs is against the Koran. Perhaps they are; one must admit, though, that Islam has hardly been a good neighbour.

Mark Pilgrim has written Dive into Python, a fine introduction to a fine programming language. Python’s a great language. The implementation could be a tad faster, but the syntax and libraries are just a joy to program in.

Yup, today we’d a bona fide hailstorm here in Denver. When I rode home at approx. 1730 it was hot and sunny; when the picture below was taken at 1829 the hail was coming down in great chunks. There were a few pieces on my patio which exceeded ice cubes in size.

Ain’t Colorado grand?

John Gruber examines the myth that if only Apple had licensed the Mac, it’d be Microsoft today. A highly interesting article, and well worth a read.

Sports Illustrated carries the tale of a pair of Grecian gymnasts whose love for one another apparently encompassed long drops onto hard asphalt. You know, as utterly stupid as they were (for God’s sake, why were they shacked up together?), one must admit that the end result is pretty much identical to Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. Those crazy Mediterraneans—it’s why we Northern Europeans have won every war since we discovered bronze: we can save our emotions for another day.

No-one could fling the insults quite like old Will. Enjoy.

According to CNN, premature boys have significantly smaller brains later in life. I was six weeks premature, and my IQ is 143—one can only wonder what it might have been:-)

Well, it turns out that those ghastly slayings in Florida were over an Xbox. Wow. If you’re going to kill over a theft—which is not an inherently unreasonable thing, after all—shouldn’t it be over something more than a video game console and some clothes? Like, one’s life savings or something, perhaps. Just a thought.

When Pulp needed to make a video of their song Bad Cover Version (which is all about a former girlfriend’s new boyfriend being a poor reprise of oneself), what else could they do but hire a bunch of bad singer-imitators to make a cover version of their song? The video of Bad Cover Version is absolutely hilarious, albeit two years old.

It’s really not: today I ate a sun-dried tomato & herb couscous for lunch and home-made pasta for dinner, and drank several very good beers (Stone’s Levitation is particularly fine) and am now enjoying a wonderful espresso (the secret to good flavour is to use the lightest roast available). We live in the wealthiest and happiest of all civilisations: if you aren’t happy, it’s your own damned fault.

If you don’t read Sluggy Freelance and Schlock Mercenary, all your so-called friends are laughing at you behind your back. Really.

Well, CNN states that intel is troubled by a drop in terrorist chatter. I know that twice in as many days my employer (Fortune 500 company, with 300,000+ employees and a history of working with the State) has sent out instructions for what do in case of a civil emergency; I wonder if one of our government contacts has passed on any information.

If al Qaeda or its supporters believe that a strike will lead to a repeat of the Spanish cowardice, I believe they will be sorely disappointed. We Americans are slow to anger, but our wrath is not the kind of thing anyone in this world can survive. If we are attacked again, and more Americans die, it will go very badly indeed for al Qaeda, its sympathisers and its supporters. In fact, if the incident is bad enough it might go quite badly for anyone who has been neutral.

Florence King wrote the most wonderful chronicle of Lizzie Borden I’ve ever read. Completely and utterly wonderful vintage King.

The NRA have a series of short blurbs about citizens using their firearms to assist the police. Cool stories all.

Yes, forty reasons to support gun control. Tongue-in-cheek, of course.

Dave Fancella’s wife had more difficulty installing Windows than Linux. A good read, with some interesting points, most notably that the Windows install made her feel unintelligent, but the Mandrake Linux install made her happy.

Frederica Mathewes-Green writes about all the troubles her hyphenated last name has created. Amusing, no?

Today I was reading the Netscape portal and happened upon a link to various Men’s Health articles. While reading advice on how to attract gals, I had an epiphany: I don’t care anymore; it’s not worth the effort. Every article is all about how not to be oneself; how to bear this & that in mind; how to seem to be what a girl is looking for. Well, to hell with all that: I am me, and that’s that. If some lady should take a fancy to me, I’ll be quite happy (overjoyed, actually), but forget trying to be aught other than I am. To mine own self am I true: take it or leave it.

Today I’d my first spill from a bike since I was a boy. Quite embarrassing, really, but also unavoidable. I was whipping ’round a traffic cone to get back onto a sidewalk, and upon passing it discovered that a crack in the street lay in my path; I attempted to avoid, but the only other course available to me led—at an angle—into the sharp edge of the kerb. Did my best to remain upright, but the various vectors, moments & angular momentum acted ’gainst me, and I fell. Got off pretty easily, actually: some road-tar on my white trousers (had they been black, of course, it would have been white stripe-paint); a small slice from my elbow; and some twisting of my left hand. All-in-all, a cheap experience.

I’m rather proud of how I fell, to tell the truth: no permanent damage (i.e. to clothing), and managing to keep my head and shoulders from ever contacting the ground, or any other obstacle.

This morning as I prepared to bake some French loaves, I discovered five or six small ants in my flour! There were no more, and none in the pantry: just those few; their eggs must have gotten into the flour somehow. Very odd—one would have thought that the days of mealworms and the like were long gone. I didn’t bother to sift them out: they’re so small that they’d have gone right through my sifter; anyway, ants are harmless, just a bit of extra protein. Heck, the Froggies eat them all the time, dipped in chocolate.

I was just listening to The Church’s Under the Milky Way and was struck by that one bit which sounds awfully like bagpipes. I wonder if that’s what really played, or if ’twas just a synthesiser of one sort or another?

Regardless, it’s an utterly wonderful song. Any fellow besides me who can’t win at least a kiss whilst it plays just isn’t trying (I, of course, with all the Italian poetry, French wine, English manners, German resolution and American invention in the world can’t expect to win even the time of day, but that’s another matter). Beautifully romantic little ditty.

As every educated person knows, tarot (or tarok, or tarokk, or tarocchi, or tarock) games have a long history (first found in the mid-15th century they predate the 18th century fortune-telling use of cards) and are quite popular in Europe. Despite their similarity to bridge or whist (they are almost all trick-taking games, with the extra suit serving as trumps). Back in 1922, August Petryl & Son of Chicago attempted to rectify this by producing the Green Spade Tarock, subtitled The American Cards. It’s an amusing variant on the French tarot deck: black clubs, yellow diamonds, pink hearts and green spades; the king, queen, knight & page have been replaced with Indian chief, Indian squaw, white rider and white scout; the fool is Uncle Sam (!), and the trump suite seems to feature Western & Indian scenes. What an interesting little card deck—I’d love to acquire a copy.

As a groomsman’s gift, my brother Tom gave each of us one of these nifty knives, each engraved with the recipient’s initials:

It is a real beauty: light and comfortable in the hand; opens with a flick of the wrist; the blade is fierce. How cool can it get?

On Wednesday my bike’s odometer hit 200 miles. That’s two hundred miles in less than two months (I bought it the 6th or 7th of June). Not too shabby for a fellow who put less than that on his old bike in a year-and-a-half.

I just finished watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a film I first saw as a college sophomore approx. a thousand million years ago. Odd film about a gigolo and a fallen woman falling in love. I’ll say this though: Audrey Hepburn was a certified, bona-fide looker. Just goes to show how far fair skin and dark hair can go to make a girl beautiful.

Inspired by my dear brother’s example, I taught myself how to sabre the tops from champagne bottles. The same technique works for beer bottles as well—really, anything under a bit of pressure. It’s cool as all get-out: I believe that I may begin opening all my bottles this way.

The method is simple: hold the bottle at the base, pointed in a roughly 30° angle away from oneself and toward some safe direction; ensure that bottle seem is pointed straight upwards; line sword up in such a fashion as to intercept the head-neck join; slide sword parallel to bottle such that it crashes into the aforesaid join at the intersection of join & seam. The head will then fly off, carrying with it the cork or bottle cap.

The principle is this: the seam is the weakest point of the bottle, and when it is struck violently it ruptures. We don’t want the bottle to rupture along the seam, as that would spill the contents, and so strike so perpendicular thereto, breaking the glass along the head-neck join. The slight crack rapidly enlarges, the head flies off and the expanding gases carry out any shards of glass which could have fallen into the liquid. It’s remarkably safe & easy.

Kurt Wenner creates beautiful 3D-like sidewalk chalk drawings. Very cool stuff: I hope that he comes to Denver someday.

Here are two photos of Tom & Em. The first was taken as they were walking down the aisle (thanks to Miss Eli Quick, soon to be Mrs. Conrad Layman, for taking the picture):

The second is of the two of them after church, the day after they were married:

And as a bonus, here’s a picture of the whole family. It’s mondo-weird to have a gal as part of the family photo, but I rather think that it’s an improvement. Thanks to Hieromonk Gabriel for the photo.

A handsome bunch, no?

When my brother Stephen was at Philmont Scout Ranch, he happened upon their Trading Post, wherein are sold sundry useful and less-than-useful items. Among these he spotted the toothpick holder; being taken with it, he purchased one for each of his brothers. What, you might ask, does a toothpick holder look like? Observe, and be enlightened:

Yes, in order to please the Mormons (who make up an ever-larger portion of the BSA) and the teetotallers, a shot glass is now called a toothpick holder. The mind boggles.

Apparently Laguiole make pipe knives in addition to their other cutlery. I want one!

It’s been one year since I started my blog (well, it was two days ago, but my ’puter was down…). Yippee!

While I am simply ecstatic with joy over Tom’s wedding, I must admit that a small part of me is saddened. As far back as I can remember it’s been Bob-and-Tom: for the vast majority of our lives we shared a room; he’s present in almost every single childhood memory I have. But when I returned to the hotel room we’d shared after his & Emily’s reception, I knew that was over, forever. It’s good and right and proper for him to cease being primarily my brother, and become primarily Em’s husband—indeed, were it otherwise, I should have to break out the Rod of Righteous Correction, the Staff of Educational Beating and the Belt of Great Bruising, for a man’s first duty must be to his wife.

Still, though, despite how happy I am for them (I do not believe I’ve ever known a more well-suited couple), and how overjoyed I am to have acquired a sister-in-law like Emily (she is an absolutely wonderful woman), I will miss the way things were. But then, I always have been a conservative: I loathe change, even for the better. My own fault, of course.

Kopi Luwak is the world’s rarest coffee: it is coffee beans which have passed through the digestive system of a civet cat. I have no idea how anyone found that this is tasty, and I really don’t care to try it.

Although it would make for a damned good story…

CNN Money notes that CEO pay leapt by a median of 22.18%. I’m no leftist—indeed, I believe that leftists are fools at best—but this seems utterly wrong in an era which has seen so many firms under-perform. Surely a CEO shouldn’t get a raise when his company has done worse than the previous year?

One month ago, Hillary Clinton admitted that the Democrats want to steal from taxpayers. Her exact words were, We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. No thanks—I think that I can spend my money far better than they can.

Also insulting is a supporter’s comment that San Franciscans like Mrs. Clinton because there’s a real appreciation for independent, intelligent women. Nonsense—I doubt they appreciated Margaret Thatcher, a truly independent and intelligent woman; I doubt they appreciate Phyllis Schlafly; I doubt they appreciate Ann Coulter. Like anyone else, what they appreciate is a like mind.

James van Allen, discoverer of the Van Allen radiation belt, has strong reservations about the utility of manned space flight. A good read, and underscores why we should quit wasting time and money what is a dead end for the foreseeable future.

Of course it is, as Daniel Okrent—the Public Editor thereof—agrees. Mr. Okrent is quickly becoming the Right’s favourite Yankee liberal, for he possesses on quality sadly lacking on the Left: honesty. We may not agree with him, but we can speak reasonably with him. I wish him luck in making the Times a trustworthy news source.

On Saturday, 24 July ’04 my brother Thomas married Emily Burgess (as she was then). It was a wonderful wedding: our father, Fr. Luke Uhl (chancellor of the Metropolis of Denver) betrothed them; His Eminence Isaiah, Metropolitan of Denver (an Orthodox metropolitan is the equivalent of a Roman cardinal) married them; our family friend, Hieromonk Gabriel (a hieromonk is a priest-monk) was also present; I served as the best man; our brother John was a groomsman and secondary witness and our brother Stephen was a groomsman and reader. It was a wonderful ceremony, with the exception of an uninvited cantor (who nonetheless did a much better job than one would have expected from an East Coast cantor).

The reception was perfect: it’s the first time I’ve ever had banquet food which I would have paid money for. The Burgesses spared no expense, I think, and it was a wonderful party.

I’m overjoyed for my brother and my new sister-in-law. They are a great couple, and I’m certain that they will have many happy years together.

Last night I barely got any sleep: instead, I lay awake in bed, pondering my toast and dancing skills (shallow, I know, but there you have it). Considering how I’ve almost nothing at all to do, I can only imagine what my poor brother and his fiancée must each be going through. I’d be surprised if they’ve three operating brain cells between them, so stressed must they be.

Well, I finally perfected the toast for my brother Tom’s wedding. For the last three months I’ve been toying with the damned thing with varied success. First I had one thing, but it wasn’t quite right, so I wrote another, and it was not it either. Then I rewrote the first with bits from the second. Then I scrapped the whole thing and started over. Then I asked around for advice and tried to blend everything which had come before. But at long last—and quite suddenly—the right things to say just came to me. There’s a little bit of this version and a little bit of that, but the final draft is for the most part a new piece. It’s as thought the floodgates were released, and everything is just right.

Now if I can only get the delivery down…

I just came upon this rather old article about North Korea. Apparently this German doctor had been in that state as an aid worker and was so shocked by what he found that he began speaking out. North Korea is a nightmare: death camps where men, women and children are slain are well-documented. And yet, we cannot do anything for two reasons: there are enough artillery pieces aimed at Seoul to destroy the city several times over, and of course their possession of nukes. This is one damned good reason for our war in Iraq: it was vital to get in before we were hamstrung by an Iraqi atomic missile capable of hitting civilised regions.

But of course leftists don’t care: they live in a world where we can all get along, if only we try. Pollyannas.

Well, after my first dance lesson, I felt pretty good. Then last night I went over to my folks’ to practise with my mother (it is a measure of my social life that I’ve no-one else to practise with) and discovered that it’s a lot easier to dance with a pro than with an amateur. Then tonight I had another lesson and practised with Mom: a palpable improvement! Perhaps this crazy scheme will work after all. I’ve a week and a day to knock myself into shape, for on the 24th my brother Thomas will be married (the reception, of course, being the whole reason for this sudden interest in legwork). I should have begun some months ago—had I, I’d be a regular pro by now. Oh well: hindsight is 20/20.

A committee have recommended that Great Britain abandon her honours system, with the temporary step of replacing the Order of the British Empire with the Order of British Excellence. Raving loons! Lackwits! Fools! This is what comes of giving the Commons power.

I reserve special venom for the idiot who claimed that the words British Empire reminded him of thousands of years of brutality. I’m fairly certain that no-one has been oppressed for millennia. Although frankly, anyone so miserable as to fail to turn the tables after thousands of years deserves whatever happens to him.

It did concern me that John Cleese and Kenneth Branagh refused to be knighted; they have gone down several notches in my estimation (unless the reason for their refusal was feeling inadequate to the honour).

Well, tonight I’d my first dance lesson. All in all, it went pretty well. I shan’t be competing for Fred Astaire’s trophies any time soon, but I should manage to acquit myself honourably.

As frequent users know, I watch an amazing number of DVDs. In so doing, I’ve hit upon some common flaws in their presentation. These are all rooted in the hatred and disrespect which manufacturers have for their customers. Here’s a catalogue thereof.

Region Coding

Region coding is the means by which a manufacturer can prevent certain DVDs from being played in the US, or the UK, or Russia, or any of the other regions of the world. This is highly annoying: there’s no technical reason why I shouldn’t be able to order an English disc and have it play on my American player.

FBI/Interpol Warning

We’ve had home video equipment for several decades now; we all know that we’re not supposed to make copies. At least with VHS & Beta, we were able to fast-forward past the stupid message—with DVDs, the players are forced to obey some idiot don’t skip command, and thus I’m stuck puttering about my home until the interminable message—with content no different than on any other DVD—scrolls by. If there simply must be a warning, make it be a simple Don’t Copy! message which displays for about 3 seconds. Or let me skip it with the chapter-skip button.

DVD Intros

These are the equivalent of those stupid Flash intros some hypoëncephalic web designers are so enamoured of: a long, long sequence of shots from the movie or series one is about to view (did I mention that it’s invariably long?). The Sharpe’s Rifles series is particularly bad about this: every episode has this stupid intro which is impossible to skip past. Fortunately, one can fast-forward past the miserable thing. Look, I have the DVD: I want to watch the product; don’t make me consider weasel-baiting a more enjoyable pastime.

Intro Ads

These are an even worse idea than that above. Not only am I forced to watch some frippery: that frippery isn’t even related to the feature I want to view! The Farscape (don’t laugh—Claudia Black was quite hot then) discs are notable for this: a lengthy series of advertisements for a bunch of animated series. Ads should be in the Special Features, where I might even appreciate them.

Unskippable Titles

This is more specific to TV series on disc. The viewer should always be able to cleanly skip past the opening and closing credits. Farscape is quite bad at this: trying to skip the opening credits tosses one into the middle of the episode. Why must the viewer be forced to watch the same boring credits sequence every single bloody episode?

Lack of Trailers

A DVD must have the theatrical trailer for its film; it should have other theatrical trailers. Yes, ads are good—when they are ads that I can choose to view. As for the trailer for the film itself, that only stands to reason. Besides, it gives someone something to watch while sliding into movie-watching mode (or preparing popcorn, for those who like that kind of thing).

Lack of Special Features

Every DVD, whether for a film or a TV series, should have a Special Features section (it’s permissible, but undesirable, for a multi-disc series to have but a single such section). Part of the whole point of DVDs is the special features which are now possible: take advantage of that! Disks which consist solely of the movie itself and chapter navigation evidence a stunning lack of effort.

Anyway, these are just some simple, commonsense suggestions. Can there be any argument ’gainst them? I think not.

I’ve hit upon the perfect idea for a bachelor’s garden: simply plant food which has gotten a bit old. Onions, garlic and potatoes all grow easily, and are often found in the back of one’s fridge. The great thing is that one doesn’t have to work to make them grow—they want to, as anyone who’s had an onion sit too long can relate.

I was just watching an episode of Frasier, and apparently the first episode of his (fictional) radio show was 21 May 1993—my 15th birthday. How very droll.

Due to my supply of pickled onions, I’ve been drinking a good number of Gibsons lately (I’d be eating a large number of sandwiches, as the onions would go great with cold cuts, but I never seem to remember them on a meat day). The recipe is a martini sans lemon twist & orange bitters and avec a pickled onion. Here’s the full receipt:

• 2½ oz. gin
• ½ oz vermouth
• 1 pickled onion

Stir gin & vermouth in a shaker with rocks; strain into a cocktail glass; pin onion, rinse and garnish glass; serve it forth. Pretty good, surprisingly.

I’ve managed to put up a bunch of pictures of yesterday’s cruiser ride. Despite the worst efforts of the police, we shall continue to ride.

You know, it really annoys me: has anyone ever seen a police officer (BTW, why are they all officers?) ticket a motorist for nearly killing a cyclist, or for harassing a cyclist, or for honking his horn in an underpass—and yet it’s necessary to ticket us. Last night there were folks setting off illegal fireworks clearly visible, yet the police chose to harass us despite the fact that we were doing to harm. Everyone who saw us smiled; we were having fun; they were having fun—I suppose that can’t be permitted.

I managed not to get a ticket: I rode right along the right hand side, so no-one could come between me and the kerb (’cause if two folks had, then I would have gotten a ticket for being the third man); I made sure to stop and make eye-contact with the cop watching me before proceeding through an intersection; and in every other way I scrupulously followed their little rules.

Rules, BTW, which per an agreement made last year the cruiser ride is allowed to break. It just doesn’t make sense to force 200-–300 people (the pictures don’t do it justice: only being there and seeing the immense body of bikers can) to proceed two-by-two.

The regular reader will recall my discovery of the Boulder Cruzer Club and how much fun it was. Well, I was called to work in Boulder today, so decided to bring my bike and repeat the experience. On the plus side, I got in twenty miles of cycling.

On the bad side, Boulder’s (by which I mean those baseborn churls who love handing out fines) harassed us every step of the way. They were ticketing for riding on the sidewalk (legal in Boulder!); for riding more than two abreast; for not coming to a full, complete, both-feet-on-the-ground, wait-three-breaths stop; for riding too far left in an empty road. Never mind that an agreement had been reached with the city a year earlier; never mind simple human decency (which said ogres lack to begin with). Therefor, I took pictures of the jerks. If you recognise one of these thugs, please cut him from your social circle; if you feel so kind as to allow him the traditional method of remedying such a cut, don’t let me stop you.

I will hopefully be able to post photos of the event itself (which was otherwise a blast) tomorrow. Down with cops!

Max Singer has written a measured & well-balanced review of the Iraq situation. Well worth reading.

no, I’m not looking to sell transport to Baba Yaga—I’ve recently bought a mortar & pestle for kitchen use. All I can say is summed up in a single word: wow. It grinds pepper faster than a pepper-grinder. It converts any amount of whole spice into powder faster and better than anything I’ve used before. Every chef worth his salt simply must get one of these magnificent devices which put all else to shame.

It’s cool.

Although our plea for independence was almost certainly mistaken (the taxes we protested so vehemently were meant to pay for the costly French and Indian Wars), we should celebrate our independence nonetheless. And what better way than to let off illegal fireworks? The fundamental American mindset is expressed in two simple words: buzz off. So long as I do not bother my neighbour, none of my neighbours may bother me. Fireworks are a great example: so long as I don’t set anyone else’s home on fire, I should be free to let of whatever I like.

This year, I bought some legal fireworks (living in the West, we have much more freedom than those poor cattle out East) to celebrate with my family: it was a lot of fun, much smoke & light & sparks & fire. Many other folks were setting off their own rockets and shells, and so far as I can tell everything came out alright. Back in the old days, Americans celebrated by firing guns and tossing dynamite into the streets: a few bottle rockets (do other states even have such things? Can one imagine a Londoner setting off a bottle rocket?) pale in comparison.

Now, I wouldn’t use them, because the danger of fire is non-negligible. But next year I plan to purchase blanks for my Beretta; one still needs to shoot upwards (blanks aren’t completely safe—there are still escaping gases), but they let one make a lot of noise safely.

I watched The Right Stuff this evening. Good flick, albeit not by any stretch of imagination the greatest film ever. A great movie about guys doing what they must: excelling above all others. Watch it if you get the chance.

Ironworks Lofts are a development on Frederick, Colo., trying to bring the loft look to the suburbs. IMHO, they’re going about it all wrong: the really cool thing about a loft environment is that it’s downtown: shopping, food, drink and entertainment are all but a few steps away. Now, yes families nowadays tend to want yards (although why is beyond me: a yard is merely a money-hole which produces nothing—a garden is all anyone needs), space for pets, good schools and a safe environment (really, they want a good place for their kids); one thing also mentioned was a desire for better parking.

So how does one bridge the gap between downtown living and suburban safety? I like the idea of façades which look like urban buildings—that’s a good idea. I like building out in the suburbs, where crime is not nearly as common (at least until the kids hit their teens…); we’ll keep that too. But having free-standing faux-downtown buildings is just odd. And where are the shops? What we want is something that looks like downtown (that’s the whole point of this exercise), but also works like it. So join the entire row of houses: now it looks like a proper street. Put the yards in back, where the alleys would be in a normal city. Attached housing has a stigma, but if there are four feet of brick connecting buildings, I don’t think anyone would complain.

That solves the look component. How do we get the downtown feel? By having businesses and housing together. Alternate community-owned business spaces and homes. Maybe some buildings are completely homes; maybe the first floor is for business and the upper floors for residence; maybe some are dedicated to business. This isn’t a condominium situation, exactly; it’s more a case of a housing association which owns its retail properties. Profits from rents are shared out to the owners, each of whom benefits from the environment.

Now, how to solve parking? Simple, really: put it underground. This development already disguises garages as delivery entrances: just take that idea a little further, and give each residence a certain number of private spaces.

Such a development would look & feel like an urban area, but without the nuisances folks dislike about a true urban environment. It’d be pretty cool.

One of the critiques which the radical Islamists raise against us is that our freedom and tolerance lead to vice on a previously unheard-of level. They’re right: many of us live in a cesspit of iniquity, and have no desire to be freed from it. But as Dinesh D'Souza points out, this is the way it must be.

The thing is, without freedom there is no virtue, but only the appearance thereof. The man who will be killed if he gets drunk cannot be lauded for his sobriety; the woman who will be stoned if she commits adultery cannot be praised for her fidelity. Yes, we live in a crass, vulgar and sinful society: but that makes the success of everyone who isn’t crass, vulgar and hopelessly sinful all the better.

This is a lesson that we Americans need to learn, just as much as the Islamists. Everyone who advocates laws against alcohol, or against homosexuals, or against atheists, or against Christians—he aims to prevent his fellows from doing what he believes is wrong: if he’s correct, he has stolen from them the ability to choose the right; if he’s wrong, then he has kept them from doing what is right.

It’s an interesting article, ending with this profound thought, that America is worthy of our love and sacrifice because, more than any other society, it makes possible for its citizens the good life, and equally important, the life that is good.

Today’s the 228th birthday of the Declaration of Independence (but not of our government—it was not formed until 21 June, 1788). We may have our problems, but we’re the best thing going. What other states are so free as our fifty? Where else is freedom—religious, political & social—so abundant?

Naturally, we need to fix some things. First of all, the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law must be overturned. This law: governs how much may be given to candidates and what may be given to parties; it forbids minors from giving; it penalises the wealthy for spending their own money; it bans mention of candidates by name within a space of time before elections; it regulates when and how politicians can fund-raise: it is in clear violation of the First Amendment. The Congress unconstitutionally passed it, violating the oaths of office of each Senator and Representative who voted in favour; President Bush signed it, violating his own oath of office; a majority of the Supreme Court upheld it, violating their own oaths. In a just world, the Congressman who voted in favour would never be re-elected, and the President and Supreme Court justices would be impeached (yes, it’s quite possible to impeach Supreme Court justices). It not being a just world, the least we can do is overturn the atrocious thing. It is so blatantly in violation of our Constitution that it cannot be allowed to stand.

Secondly, we need to stop the vile practise of infanticide. Morally, this is a far worse matter than the above—but it is civilly more legitimate: certainly the State has the power to make murder legal; we have the duty to ensure that it does not. Laws against abortion no more violate the right to privacy than do laws against murder. The fœtus is a human being, distinct from its mother and from its father; that it is dependant upon her in no way gives her the right to slay it, any more than an eight-year-old’s dependence on his parents gives them the right to kill him. Infanticide needs to be banned and punished, now.

Thirdly, we need to end Prohibition. There is no legitimate argument for outlawing recreational drugs: they are the essence of a private matter; the essence of what Mill wrote about when he advocated the liberty of every man to live as he sees fit. For a country founded on freedom, our treatment of drugs is an abomination. Regulate them, control them, tax them—treat drugs like any other consumable substance.

These are, to my mind, the most pressing issues at hand in the US: one is a baldfaced violation of our basic law; one is a baldfaced injustice; one is a baldfaced intrusion of the State where it has no business being; all are easily correctable.

Roger Pilon reflects on the nature of liberty, culminating with this fine thought:

What the Founders envisioned was a world in which individuals pursued happiness as individuals or as members of private, voluntary associations—families, businesses, churches, charities, and the like. That world of private individuals and associations—the civil society that Tocqueville spoke of—was where most of life was meant to be lived, with government limited primarily to securing the rights we have or we create in that world.

Let is strive to return to that condition; let us even try to improve on it (for even the Founders were not complete respecters of Liberty in every aspect). Where there is a definite need for government, let it exist; but where there is none, let it not.

The captive Marine is claimed to have been beheaded. If true, this could be the worst mistake the rebels have ever made. Marines really don’t take well to the deaths of their own. I am reminded of the tale of a pair in one of the Banana Wars in the early 20th century (Nicaragua, perhaps?) who walked into the enemy camp disguised only in ponchos, shot the enemy leader dead and cut out his heart—all to avenge their captain. The (possible) murderers of this Marine stated, Pull your military and you'll be safe; it’s their safety they should be concerned about.

At last, someone has hidden a digital camera inside a Zippo! How extremely cool—how very clever. I can't say that it’d be very useful, but man would it be sweet to own. Talk about a geek toy!

Oh happy day; oh joyous time! Today while leaving my condo, I discovered a ten dollar note lying in the street, with no-one about whom it may have belonged to. Out of nowhere, I suddenly find myself $10 richer. Perhaps I shall buy an island…

Last night I ordered a fast food hamburger (from A&W, my first since perhaps my freshman year in college. It having been so long, I seem to have completely forgotten the cardinal rule: Ask for Meat, Bread & Cheese. And so I received a fine burger covered in lettuce (innoffensive) as well as pickles, onions, tomato and mayonnaise (utterly foul). What human being eats mayonnaise on a burger?!? Why would one waste good beef in such a fashion? The same goes for onions and tomatoes. These are abominations in the eyes of the Lord (it’s somewhere in Ecclesiastes, I’m sure). And why would one ever eat foul fast-food pickles? I love a good pickle: no fast food restaurant has ever served a decent pickle.

To all the burger joints in all the world: quit shoving slop onto my burgers. Give me meat, bread and cheese—I’ll tart my burger up to my own specs, thankyouverymuch.

A Democrat co-worker today posted a bumper sticker which read, The last time someone listened to a Bush, folks wandered around the desert for 40 years. What is amusing about this is, of course, that if the Isrælites had listened to God (the Voice of the burning bush), they wouldn’t have wandered around the desert for 40 years—the wandering was punishment for idolatry or some other such disobedience.

This reminds me of the spelling-challenged idiot who called Bush an idiot, and of course of the Democrats fighting for the votes of the mentally incompetent in the last election (if one cannot figure out a simple ballot, one doesn’t deserve to vote).

It all fits: no-one who is both intellectually honest and educated on the issues can be a leftist—the left is wrong. Thus the Democrats must pander to the liars and the stupid.

Hussein made his first court appearance today; an Iraqi blog marks the occasion with the post Saddam Is in the Cage. This is an historic moment: hope comes to the Iraqis, and justice will surely fall upon Saddam. In a matter of weeks or months he’ll face the same end he sent so many to, and then his course will have been run.

We’re at sixteen months into the Iraq War; Karl Zinsmeister notes that we’re in a much better position now than in other American wars: Washington had surrendered in the French and Indian Wars; he had lost 90% of his strength in the Revolution; in the Second World War, Japan had just conquered all of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and had occupied American soil for ten years, and meanwhile Germany had conquered Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland and Yugoslavia.

We’re doing pretty damned well.

While taking some training for work today, I discovered that the not-for-profit sector in the US spends more than $500 billion a year—more than the GDP of Brazil, Russia or Australia. What an incredible nation we live in!

Today I broke 100 miles on my new bike (bought on the 7th inst.). Not too shabby—the mileage on the old one (which I sold to my younger brother) was only 270–280, and I’d that for a year-and-a-half. Pretty soon I’ll have a thousand!

…and all is well with the world. God’s in His heaven, birds are in the air, and my mace is in my home—its home from now on. Here are a few pictures of the beloved thing:

Isn’t she a beaut? Isn’t it a work of art? Isn’t it simply perfect?

My only problem now is that I really want to start knocking holes in my walls…

Triops are these weird little three-eyed (hence the name) shrimp which are living fossils; they’ve been around for more than a hundred million years. Very cool.

I’ve written previously about Mr. Steven Foster’s superlative bartending site; at its previous location (now taken over by a domain squatter) it served me & my buddy Phil Forshee most ably while we were in college. It is a site to be visited, a site to be archived, a site to remember when need arises (and please be sure to drop Mr. Foster a line—I feel certain that he’d appreciate it).

But that’s not why I write today (well, not totally). Mr. Foster has had the bright idea of posting a page with scans of old sepia-tone photos of his ancestors and relatives: in his words, old pictures of my relatives, look so they are not forgotten. What a piece of Americana! Some happy, some grim; some handsome, some plain, some downright ugly—but each a once living, breathing specimen of our species. Now they all—good, bad, evil & indifferent—rest in the earth which they once walked. My favourite image is the folks lined up by their church (or possibly schoolhouse).

Anyway, visit his site and raise a glass to Foster’s forefathers, and raise another to him. The man has created a true treasure, which deserves to be known, used and lauded.

I’ve posted my recipe for pizza—a receipt certain to delight & amuse. An excellent repast, one I’ve finally mastered (despite my earlier crowing, it was only the last week that I nailed the skill down). The secret is sugar—without the sugar, all is lost. That, and plenty of oil in the dough.

Today I attended the ordination of my friend George, the brother of my friend Dean, to the priesthood; a bit more than three fortnights ago, he had been ordained a deacon. In a twist of ironic fate, I was impressed into service as the videographer—the ironic bit is that I utterly hate the breed. I can tolerate photographers, barely (the finished work is worth it), but the divine services are not meant to be experienced piecemeal, but rather as a whole. I consider the whole thing a sacrilege. The reader may wonder why I performed the job, if I find it so repellent. The answer is simple: God forgives much; the female of the species nothing at all.

Anyway, I did my best, despite the limitations of the medium and my lack of skill (I’d not shot video before this day). There are some good shots, which I feel should edit together into something decent. The only problem is that my instincts at the moment are really for still photography. C'est la vie.

It’s odd to think of George as Fr. George—but so he is, from now on. It’s been a long time coming, but the day has finally arrived. He’s a good guy, and should serve God and His Church well. Axios!

Here are some photos I took afterwards:

The first photo is of Fr. George, his brother Dean and their parents; the second of Fr. & his presvytera Katina; the last of Fr. George & Katina with Fr. Mark and presvytera Anna; Fr. Mark was the Youth Director of the (then) Diocese of Denver a decade ago.

I should note that in real life Fr. George looks nothing like the nerdy neighbour-boy in Better Off Dead; I’m afraid that my camera caught a wrong angle.

My dear brother and his fair fianceé are getting married in less than a month, and of course I’ve received an invitation (and a very well-done one, too; Mrs. & Miss Burgess have impeccable taste in these things)—said invite came with a response card. I’ve not sent the damned thing in yet, and for a very good reason. The thing has lines for my name, and for whether I will attend, and to indicate whether I will be bringing a girl or not. Certainly I’m attending, and just as certainly I have no girl to invite. But responding with that latter fact is just too bitter.

I hate being single.

Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the most intelligent man on today’s Left, tears Michael Moore a new one. He rips apart the loony’s latest film, pointing out the myriad ways it lies, misleads, self-contradicts, panders and is in general worthless.

Moore has polluted our national discourse for far too long. Will no-one rid us of this troublesome pest?

As Andrew McCarthy notes, Iraq and Al Qaeda were involved with each other. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, leftists!

Declan McCullagh notes that Europe has terrible laws, making it unsuited for the Internet in specific, and business in general. Their most recent foolishness is trying to forbid using the Internet to be insulting (say, by passing around an ethnic joke). What a bunch of rubes.

Bob Bemer, one of the creators of ASCII, the man who invented the escape sequence, recently passed away.

Russian organised crime is exploiting flaws in IIS and IE to infect Windows hosts. They infect a Windows web servers running Internet Information Server, and then use it to infect visitors who are running Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, users of real OSes, web servers and web browsers are invulnerable. When will the world learn: Microsoft cannot be trusted to run one’s business, home or anything else.

These folks want fences and/or alarms to be mandatory on pools, simply because kids can drown. Across the nation, 250 kids die a year in pools; in Florida alone, there are more than a million pools. Am I the only one who finds it ridiculous to make millions of people pay lots of money to prevent a non-problem? More kids probably die of head colds.

Never mind that some of us are single, and have no friends with kids, and therefor are not likely to have any children running about anyway. It really gets on my nerves how parents like to imagine that everyone has children. Half of my property taxes go to public schools—schools which I’d never used, even had I children. Who knows how much of my state and federal taxes go to programmes for children I don’t have. Parents pay fewer taxes than I do, and get more services. Now they want to make swimming pools more expensive.

As America sinks further into being a police state, the US Supreme Court has ruled that one may be arrested for having the temerity to refuse to produce ID, even when not driving and not doing anything wrong. Gosh, thanks guys. Perhaps you should authorise mandatory badges indicating one’s religion, sexual orientation and political affiliation. Do any of the justices’ mothers even remember who their fathers were? Bastards.

Those crazy Brits—first they started out calling crosswalks zebra crossings, from the alternating black and red lines. Then the pelican crossing (PEdestrian LIght CONtrolled crossing) came about. Then there was the puffin crossing (Pedestrian User-Friendly INtelligent crossing). Now there is the toucan crossing. One can only wonder what they will come up with next.

The first civilian space flight has ended successfully. Mike Melvill has become the first civilian to earn astronaut’s wings, by flying SpaceShipOne just over 62½ miles above sea level. This is an historic moment: for the first time, men have entered space without help from any state. Who knows what the future may bring? Asteroid mining—maybe even colonies someday. And perhaps, centuries from now, some physicist will figure out how to travel to the stars. Although I have grave reservations about space exploration, this is how it should be done: private citizens financing the adventure, paving the way for mankind.

What a glorious time to be alive!

A month ago I visited my brother Thomas for my birthday; I brought along a fine cigar with a sentimental past (20 years old, once belonging to our grandfather) and my beautiful electric blue Colibri jet lighter, with double cigar cutters and chrome detailing: a true work of art. Foolishly, I packed it in my luggage—and the beasts of the Transportation Security Administration, loathsome and subhuman animals that they are, stole it therefrom. Never mind that not a single æroplane in all of human history has ever been lost due to a lighter. Never mind that it belonged to me. Never mind the Fourth Amendment, which reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Never mind the Seventh Amendment, which reads:

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Never mind that these used to be the United States of America, a bastion of liberty, a beacon illuminating the world. No, my effects were rifled without a warrant; my lighter was stolen without probable cause, without oath or affirmation; I was deprived of $80 without benefit of a jury.

We’ve all read the stories of those children who have had their Christmas presents snatched from their mothers’ bags. A woman cannot travel by air without having her underclothing rifled by thugs. A man cannot cross the country without hazarding his every possession. A child must risk even his lollipops. This is completely intolerable.

This was once a free country. I remember as a boy, how my parents would describe Europe, and how they constantly needed to show identification to travel. That would never happen here, I was told, this is America. Hah! Try boarding a plane without State-issued papers. What happened to our once proud people? What happened to our Constitution? What happened to our freedom?

We shall not be free until every last one of these swine dangles from a gibbet. We shall not enjoy our liberty until their bilious breath ceases to contaminate our once-clean air.

Thomas Jefferson would be ashamed of us. Patrick Henry would be humiliated. George Washington would disavow any relation. We aren’t fit to call ourselves heirs to their legacy. It makes me ill.

The man who streaked the Super Bowl has been found guilty (I didn’t even know that it’d happened, lucky me): among the arguments the prosecutor made is that, As light-hearted about this as I’d like to be, we don’t live in a society anymore where we can excuse this kind of behaviour. Now there’s a sad, miserable, bitter woman. Get a life. Streaking is odd, and foolish—but America was founded by odd, foolish kooks! Some people need to relax. Sheesh.

I recently saw a wonderful quote from the eminent Dr. Johnson: Why, Sir, our tastes greatly alter; the lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore. Very straightforward, and quite true: the older one gets, the less the joys of the young appeal to one. One couldn’t talk me onto a teeter-totter for love nor money.

Windows is so insecure that it’s impossible to secure it; in the time between installation on the net and downloading vital patches, it will already have been infected. Friends don’t let friends do Windows.

I am reliably informed that my brother’s fiancée, Lieutenant (j.g.) USN, has passed her boards and received her SWO pin. Or, in her case, my Dad’s SWO pin, which he gave her this past Thanksgiving, the day before Emily was baptised. We’re all terribly proud of her

Well, I’ve set a new distance record for myself (try not to laugh, all ye cyclists): 23½ miles. Saturday morn I’d the idea that a ride would be pleasant, so I set out in a roughly northwestern direction. Then I’d the idea that it might be nice to go downtown, so I set about finding the Cherry Creek Trail. I never quite found it, but I did find myself on Evans just east of I-25. Then I decided it’d be cool to visit my old digs, but before I got there, I thought I might head north on Colorado and help my brother with his Eagle project at Assumption Cathedral (which should be called Dormition Cathedral, but that’s another tale).

So that I did, helping them with setup for their upcoming Greek festival while I was at it. When I was done, I turned about and headed back home. My previous record was 20 miles, but I spent a good bit of that just cruising aimlessly; this time I attempted to go all-out the whole way (keeping my cadence at 90–110 rpm). This was a lot tougher than I thought it might be. I was a mass of soreness last night, but next time it’ll be easier, and the time after that it’ll be easier still, until one fine day I’ll be doing it for warm-up.

One of my goals is to be able to go downtown without a car. Light rail isn’t due down here until ’06; I figure that I should be able to make it there & back in under an hour each way before then.

The rumour that folks in the Middle Ages over-spiced their foods to compensate for spoilage arose in the Victorian period (among folks unfamiliar with cooking); a report debunks this (in PDF, unfortunately), pointing out that this is simply not possible (she even conducts a smell-test with spices and spoilt meats). She also refers to an interesting piece about pies (also a PDF), which apparently can act as primitive tin cans: surround meat with a pastry, cook it and since everything inside is dead, and nought from the outside can get in, it’s preserved for a decent while.

Is there aught more beautiful in this world than Bach’s Air on the G String? I don’t believe so, although Beethoven’s moonlight Sonata comes quite close. Sigh…

New examination of the records of the Inquisition shows that it was pretty mild. Less than one percent of those who were judged were executed—and none were executed by the Roman Church. Heresy was a secular offence; the Inquisition was a means of clearing someone’s name, no condemning it.

Meghan Cox Gurdon has another nice article about the shifting alliances within her family. I’m not certain that in ours we ever had such things: I tend to think of us brothers as having the same relations one to another that we’ve ever had. No doubt this annoys John, who is no longer Our Little Fuzzball, and Stephen, who hasn’t needed a nappie changed in well over a decade.

An interesting timeline of the events of 11 September ’01 was recently released. Man, were we caught with our pants down. It’s a damned good thing no-one ever attacked us in force!

From A.P. Taylor’s English History, 1914–1945:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913–14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that way here in the US today?

Apparently, there is a gruesome video of the torture at Abu Ghraib—no, not the extremely mild recent goings-on (which are still completely unacceptable, and should be punished appropriately): beheadings, tongues torn out, hands sliced off, arms broken in pieces. Will the media which demanded that we see the photos of American misbehaviour also demand that we see photos of what Saddam did? I doubt it sincerely: after all, it is only Americans who can be evil in this modern world.

I recently discovered DenverDrinks.com, a site which lists happy hour specials in the heart of Denver. Very cool resource.

Some folks want to put Reagan on the $10 or $20 bill. I disagree—Hamilton and Jackson both deserve to be remembered as much as he does. Reagan should go on the $50 bill, replacing Grant.

I recently found a post my Joe Mariani giving an hyper-abbreviated version of the events in the King Arthur story (he was commenting on the absolutely horrid First Knight), which so good I figured it deserves a repost:

Now, as I recall the story, Arthur became king as a very young man with the help of Merlin and the sword Excalibur. After subduing those who opposed his ascendancy, he sent his best friend and favorite knight, Lancelot (the son of the French king), to bring his promised bride, Guinevere, whom he had never seen. Lancelot and Guinevere fell in love during the trip. For years, Guinevere and Lancelot tried to hide their love, but it was an open secret, and the King forgave them completely until his half-sister, Morgause (or Morgan), caused Agravaine (one of her sons) to catch the two in flagrante delicto, as it were, and force the matter into the open. Lancelot fled, and the Queen was accused of adultery. Lancelot rescued her and held off the rest of Arthur’s knights in his castle…to make it short: Mordred, Arthur’s son by his half-sister, took over the kingdom while Arthur was in France. In a huge battle, begun by accident (a soldier drew his sword to kill a snake while Arthur and Mordred were discussing peace), Mordred mortally wounded Arthur, and was killed by him. After Arthur died, he was taken away in a barge by his half-sister (now a nun). Lancelot became a priest, along with the knights that were left (Bedivere and Percival, I believe). Guinevere became a nun. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the story’s good enough to be filmed as is.

Nope, he’s right: it’s a damned good story, and it’d be nice if someday someone made a film of it.

I just understood the meaning of that phrase—all my life I thought that it meant that pride leads to a fall; really, it means that pride leaves one after one has failed. What a fool I’ve been all these years! I suppose that a perfect SAT verbal doesn’t really mean all that much after all.

Well, the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, deciding instead that the father in question lacked standing, as his custody of the girl on whose behalf he brought the case is in doubt. Rather than skirting the issue, the justices should have faced the issue like men and decided it one way or another.

I found a cool list of numbers of death per million hours. Living itself comes out 1.53 deaths per million hours; only four activities are more dangerous: scuba diving (1.98 per); on-road motorcycling (8.80 per); general aviation (15.58 per; this is not the same as passenger flights, which are 0.15 per); and skydiving, at a whopping 128.71 deaths per million hours. Interestingly, hunting is less dangerous than riding, flying or driving. The least dangerous thing of all? Residential fires.

The Bicycle Helmet FAQ says it all:

We do not advocate the use of helmets, but neither do we counsel against their use. It is clear from the evidence we present that cycling is not so dangerous an activity that their use is particularly justified. We wear no special protective headgear for other every day activities such as walking and driving a car, even though our heads are exposed to similar risks for far greater lengths of time.

We have reason to believe the helmet debate has little to do with safety, and much more to do with commercial interest and a specific lifestyle advocacy similar to that which would control what we eat, drink and take into our lungs. If the debate was about reducing the already low frequency of cyclist head injuries, then the principal issue would be about whether manufacturing standards should be modified in order to ensure production of helmets which actually provided a reasonable amount of protection. Really effective helmets would be of such a design (i.e. ugly) and construction that few would buy them. Also, there are downsides to helmet use and scientific reasons to believe they exacerbate injuries in certain types of impacts. At the moment, a discussion on helmet problems is not in the interests of helmet manufacturers.

In my opinion, a helmet is only really good at preventing cosmetic damage, from abrasions and the like. A bicycle helmet can’t stop the kind of forces involved in a nasty accident, so won’t save one’s life. So the choice is: wear a helmet and look like a twit every time one rides; or don’t wear a helmet, and possibly get a nasty scar maybe sometime perhaps in a blue moon. A scar, at least, makes for a good story—a bike helmet doesn’t even do that.

I just finished watching Get Over It, a very loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (in which the play-within-a-play is, of course, the very same), and the though occurred to me: what happened to all those light & frothy teen comedies so popular when I was in college? Things like She’s All That, Ten Things I Hate About You (another Shakespeare adaptation, this time of Taming of the Shrew), Josie & the Pussycats, Clueless (an adaptation of Austen’s Emma), Loser, Blow Dry and even American Pie. I suppose that the problem is that 11 September happened, and the world no longer seems a happy & peaceful place. There are wars going on, and there’s no place for lighthearted comedy.

Bah! I cry—lightheartedness is exactly the thing we’re fighting for: the freedom to love & laugh; the freedom to go about one’s life peaceably; the freedom to waste 90 minutes and a few bucks on some silly film. So Hollywood, get out there and make some movies again!

Well, I finally put up pics from the Boulder Cruzer Club which the regular reader may recall me mentioning. Some exceedingly strange folks, but lots of fun.

Well, I bought Mystery of the Abbey, as I’ve wished to do since my friend Shaima recommended it. It is a cool little game—I can’t wait to play it. It looks to be worth every penny.

A possible urban legend:

An elderly lady phoned her telephone company to report that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called but that on the few occasions when it did ring, her dog always moaned right before the phone rang. The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic pet or senile elderly lady.

He climbed a nearby telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialled the subscriber’s house. The phone didn’t ring right away, but then the dog moaned loudly and the telephone began to ring.

Climbing down from the pole, the telephone repairman found:

1. The dog was tied to the telephone system’s ground wire via a steel chain and collar.
2. The wire connection to the ground rod was loose.
3. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current when the phone number was called.
4. After a couple of such jolts, the dog would start moaning and then urinate on himself and the ground.
5. The wet ground would complete the circuit, thus causing the phone to ring.

Almost too good to be true, but it could happen.

Piecepack is a free board game system which appears to have a great deal of promise. It is composed of four suits (suns, moons, crowns & arms) and six values (null, ace, 2, 3, 4 & 5) distributed across 24 tiles, 24 coins, 4 dice & four pawns. Very cool seeming.

For about a month or so now—since shortly after my car needed repairs. While the repairs were being done, I biked or walked to & from work, and after I had the car back, I figured that I might as well keep it up.

Well, it has been wonderful! I feel so much better and have so much more energy that it’s like I’m a teenager again. In fact, last Saturday I went to the pool without a shirt on for the first time in a decade. The ride home is wonderful, what with the fresh air (esp. with the perfume of flowers on the breeze). It’s just so much more pleasant than slogging home through traffic. Believe it or not, it takes me the same amount of time to get to work on my bike as in my car, but this way is so much more pleasant.

Biking rules!

For some unfathomable reason, Victoria’s Secret mailed unto me a bra, apron and hot-pant set. It was delivered to the wrong address (mine), but the folks at the listed address have no idea whom it was for—they deny knowledge of this Molly A. King. And so I’m stuck with a set of women’s clothing: were I a transvestite, this would be mana from heaven, but as I’m not, it’s a nuisance. So if anyone would like a 34B bra or apron–hot-pant set, just let me know. Or, what would be even better: introduce me to a gal who’d like them:-)

Eric Solomon has devised a clever pen-and-paper game called Middleman in which players buy and sell tins of some commodity. It looks like a quick play, with but 10 turns (I’d extend it to an even dozen, of course), and an intriguing randomisation system—no dice are needed, and indeed nothing more than pen, paper & players is necessary. The game sheet is short and easy to reproduce from memory. Now if only I could find someone to play with me…

Dave Kopel ably sums up Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Reagan was the first president I remember (Carter was too early in my life), and is still my idea of what a president should be. He achieved great things, and our nation is in his debt. He was not perfect—no man can be—but he was the best choice at that point in time. It’s sad to see him go.

Today, Venus transited across the Sun—the first time in almost 122 years. William Harkness, the Director of the US Naval Observatory, wrote at the time:

There will be no other transits of Venus till the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004. When the last transit occurred the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that wondrous scientific activity, which has led to our present advanced knowledge, was just beginning. What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows. Not even our children's children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day.

How poignant. His World of Tomorrow is our today. There’s one more transit in our lifetimes, in eight years—and then that’s it for all of us.

It was 90° when I got home at 2030 this evening—even my furniture is warm to the touch. Ugh, I hate summer. How I long for grey clouds, and fresh-fallen snow, and for the sun to be blotted from the sky.

From Thomas Jefferson’First Inaugural Address:

Entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honour and confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practised in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence…With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one more thing, citizens fellow wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

A wise and frugal government, which restrains men from injuring one another and leaves them alone otherwise, not stealing that which one earns—would that not be a great thing to have?

…that my brandy is pre-warmed. Kinda nice, actually.

Just finished watching a very interesting film, I-60. It’s best described as a post-modern morality play. Not for kids—there’s a particular bit I’m thinking of—but well-worth watching for those in my generation. Quite enjoyable.

Today I laid down a jar of pickled garlics according to the recipe I used for onions. It’ll be ready in two months or so.

The regular reader will notice that I have a great love for pickled foods. Part of it is just the fact that they taste superb: lots of salt and vinegar combine to make a savoury repast. Part of it is the fascination I have with food preservation: it’s so cool to be able to stave off corruption (or take advantage of it, as when making beer, wine or sauerkraut). Man has loved preserved foods for centuries—why should I be any different from my ancestors?

Unfortunately, it appears that pickled, salted and smoked foods cause stomach cancer. But quite honestly, I just don’t care. I’m going to die someday anyway—I might as well enjoy my time here on earth. A life without pickles; a life without bacon; a life without sauerkraut: that wouldn’t be life at all, but a kind of ghastly hollow caricature thereof. It would be an unlife.

Today whilst searching for information on how to preserve apples, I discovered Recipezaar, a cooking site with a unique difference: the recipes can be scaled easily. I found one for pickled apples which wanted a peck (about 20); I was able to scale it down to 4 apples without having to do any math in my head. The site also calculates nutritional information based on its database of ingredients. Absolutely wonderful—this is how recipe sites should work. Let the computer do the scut-work, and let man have fun.

My buddy Adam and his fiancée; are putting a contract down on this house; isn’t it a beaut? Man, it must be nice having two incomes.

Whilst in Boulder this evening, I happened upon an event which seems to be known simply as Happy Thursday. Folks ride around on their bikes, circle about through traffic, shout Happy Thursday! to passers-by and generally make nuisances of themselves. It was mondo fun. There was one guy with a unicycle, and another with a penny-farthing, one hauling a trailer with a stereo, and yet another dressed as a cow. There were small children (indeed, one lad on a one-speed put everyone else to shame with his energy!) and old men. There were guys & gals. Much fun was had by all. I took some photos; if any of them came out, I’ll post them sooner or later.

Inkscape is a nice little vector graphics editor derived from Sodipodi, which was itself derived from gill. Looks very featureful and pleasant to use.

The Graduate Mafia Brotherhood of Princeton is a bunch of fellows who play an interesting game known as mafia. There are three mafiosi, one angel and any number of citizens. The game is divided into day and night: during the night, all players close their eyes and then the mafiosi awake and designate a citizen for assassination; then they go back to sleep and the angel wakes up; he points to one player and is informed by the moderator whether that player is mafia or citizen; in the morning the assassinated player is found dead; then the players all vote to convict and kill a single one of their number. The goal of the mafia is to kill off all citizens; the goal of the citizens is to kill off all the mafia.

The page has a number of variations. One of the more interesting is to combine mafia and werewolf (which is the same game, but with werewolves, a seer and townsfolk): the mafia and werewolves are fighting one another and killing off civilians. Best played with a large number of players, I imagine.

Kate’s (Vegan) Cookery Site has a good variety of decent-sounding food. I’m not vegan, of course—someday I am going to write something about how standard vegetarianism is incompatible with Christianity—but I do fast from meat for over half the year. Sites like this can liven up the Lenten diet considerably.

Today I hath pickled onions according to this recipe (and adding a stub of horseradish to each jar, for added flavour). In a related matter, I tasted one of the pickled lemons I laid down in January. Wow! A thin slice would go wonderfully with cold cuts & cheese on good bread. On its own, it’s a tad overpowering, but still quite tasty.

Next on my list: pickled garlics.

Ever wonder what a Hollywood Car is, or the Engine Equalisation Law might be? Then read Roger Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms.

Icehouse is an intriguing game system. The playing pieces can be used for a myriad different games. Very slick.

Maxima is a cool symbolic algebra system based on software which has been around since the 1960s and which has been continuously updated since. Available under the GPL, it has survived even the death of the maintainer. Very cool, if math is one’s thing. And neat no matter what.

MIT have put online the entire text of How to Design Programs, an excellent guide to software design.

A very cool arms & armour museum has opened in Kentucky. I’ll have to get out there, soon.

Paul Greenberg has written a piece on Memorial Day far better than I could have done; be sure to read it.

Today I made shortbread. It’s amazing how easy the stuff is to make. The recipe I used went on and on about how important the quality of the butter used is, but somehow the standard Costco stuff managed to make the best shortbread I have ever had (seriously—I cannot believe that it came out of my oven). Wow is it good. So good, in fact, that I need to give it away and get it out of the house before I eat it all. The stuff is addictive.

Simple Cooking is dedicated to good, plain, wholesome cooking. Good site, with some good recipes. Although I am not bloody likely to eat another steak-and-kidney pie, after the one I’d at a London pub which tasted as though it had been marinated in a urinal for a few weeks. Their other recipes are worth reading, though.

From the 1960s through to 1997, the combination to activate Minuteman missiles was 00000000. I am so proud of our Air Force.

My brother Thomas made pizza while I was visiting him last weekend; impressed by how good it was (he’s an excellent cook), I resolved that I need to follow his lead. And so the very night I returned home I procured the appropriate tools and made a pie. Yesterday I did the same; here is a photo of my Margherita pizza (named, incidentally, after a queen of Italy; the colours are those of the Italian flag: green basil; white cheese; red sauce):

I’m not yet to Tom’s level—but I’m getting better. When I have the art mastered, I shall put a recipe up on my bachelor recipes page.

dillo is a small but capable web browser written against gtk+ (and hence running on Linux/Solaris/AIX/HP-UX/&c). It’s pretty basic, but I kinda like it. Among its advantages is the fact that it can run on a handheld such as an iPaq (the binary is but 350K). One has to give the fellow behind it a lot of credit. He’s looking for funding, so ig you’ve a few extra bucks, forward them his way.

I saw in Tom’s Rants that coriander helps prevent food poisoning. As he notes, it’s damnedly good stuff, and another reason to eat it is welcome.

What does annoy me is that the article calls coriander cilantro. It’s not cilantro, it never has been cilantro and for as long as I’ve breath in my body it shall not be cilantro. The article even goes so far as to say that the seeds of cilantro are also known as coriander. Newsflash: the English word is coriander; the Spanish word is cilantro. Both coriander seeds and coriander leaf are eaten, and both are good. There is no such thing as cilantro in the English language, and more than I drink cerveza.

FWIW, the Spanish word cilantro is a corruption of Late Latin coliandrum, which is itself a corruption of the Latin coriandrum. Those with any wit at all can see that the English coriander is much closer to the Latin coriandrum than the debased cilantro.

Thrice-accursed languages contaminating ours.

The odometer on my bike rolled over 200 miles today. Not all that impressive to other folks, who might do that in a day, but still a nice milestone for me.

William F. Buckley, Jr., has recently published The Fall of the Berlin Wall (which I hope to soon own); it has been excerpted in the National Review Online. I highly recommend it:

Tumbling Down

The fall of the Berlin Wall

Passions & Confusions

Irrepressible move west

The Sinatra Doctrine

Rampaging hooligans move history

Party at Checkpoint Charlie

Not West; not East—just Germany

Regeneration & Hope

Enter the post-wall era

It’s hard to believe now how different things were then. I was just a kid when it all happened, but all of us who were around then remember that incredible winter when Communist socialism finally fell. The world is a much better and freer place. Not perfect—socialism still exists, even in our own states and cities—but things are so much better now than they were. There was a time when we all expected to face a world-shattering war; that particular threat is gone now.

Outnumbered five-to-one, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders fixed bayonets and charged an outnumbering rebel force in Iraq, the first British bayonet charge since the Falklands. One can only imagine the Oh, sh*t! moment the enemy had, slightly before 35 of them fell to the attack. But three Scots were wounded; none were slain.

Here’s a clip from a relevant article:

Outnumbered British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers in the Army’s first bayonet charge since the Falklands War 22 years ago.

The fearless Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stormed rebel positions after being ambushed and pinned down.

Despite being outnumbered five to one, they suffered only three minor wounds in the hand-to-hand fighting near the city of Amara.

The battle erupted after Land Rovers carrying 20 Argylls came under attack on a highway.

After radioing for back-up, they fixed bayonets and charged at 100 rebels using tactics learnt in drills.

When the fighting ended bodies lay all over highway the and more were floating in a nearby river. Nine rebels were captured.

An Army spokesman said, This was an intense engagement.

The last bayonet charge was by the Scots Guards and the Paras against Argentinian positions.

Note that the last charge was also by Scotsmen. This could be due to the fact that Scotch soldiers are four times as likely to do cocaine, heroin or other hard drugs. Seen on a blog comment:

Once again we see the vaunted courage of our terrorist opponents:

It’s all well and good to truss up and slaughter a helpless captive, screaming Allah akbar! with your masked buddies to keep up your courage. It’s something again to hose down a convoy with an AK in the hope of hitting something, then run away and hide.

It’s quite another when you provoke a response involving a screaming, lunatic Scotsman intent on impaling you on a pike.

I have a hunch things are going to quiet down in that area of operations.

All very cool.

Kate O’Beirne made an interesting point in her article about medals awarded in the recent wars, that media coverage of the war portrays our (bad word, but soldiers doesn’t cover sailors, Marines or pilots) warriors in exactly two ways: victims (the dead) or evildoers (the guards at Abu Ghraib). What is not shown is valour, or heroism, or anything like.

This is exactly the condition in which our modern society finds itself. We can recognise those who harm others, and we can recognise those who are harmed, but we do not recognise good. This is the kind of muddle-headed thinking which leads to victims being referred to as heroes. They’re not (necessarily). A hero does something; a victim has something done to him.

The truth of the matter is that we still have many heroes; we still have many good men who strive for that which is right. I’m not writing just about the war, but about life in general: the man who gives up a night on the town with his buddies to give his family a better life is doing good; the couple where in Denver who feed the poor every Saturday morning are doing good; the clerk who helps one find a store which does have what one is looking for is doing good.

But our sick society doesn’t recognise any of that. As far as it is concerned, the world is made up of victims and victors.

John J. Donohue & Steven D. Levitt argue that it does. It makes a certain amount of sense: of the roughly 1.6 million slain yearly, many are precisely those who would be most likely to engage in criminal behaviours in the future (due to a disproportionate number of the aborted springing from poor homes). In a way, our modern society has realised the misanthropic dream of murdering the violent classes; we simply do it in a quiet way. No public executions; no clearing of the ghettos; no outward messiness whatsoever—just death dealt to the innocent, privately and quietly, where almost no-one cares to think about it. In a way, it’s worse: at least the mass-murderer is being honest about what he does; we pretend not to know what we’re doing.

Today I noticed that my net worth has exceeded seventy-five grand for the first time. It seems like only yesterday that I had finally gotten into the black after being in the red for so long. It’s a nice feeling.

Before anyone gets jealous, I should note that the figure includes about $5,000 in depreciating assets (e.g. my deep fryer, DVD player, bicycle, collection of HP calculators I purchased when I believe they’d be exiting that market &c.) which I’ll probably never sell, as well as about $3,100 in bad debts owed me by others, which I’ll almost certainly never see repaid. Still, it’s a great demonstration of how well hard work and heavy savings can pay off.

Steven E. Landsburg argues that it makes more economic sense to execute worm-writers than murderers. He may be correct. I prefer outlawing them, though. To make someone an outlaw removes him from the protection of the law. His property can be taken, and it’s not stealing; his person can be beaten, and it’s not assault; his life can be taken, and it’s not murder, or manslaughter, or even homicide. One who is outside the law is fair game for anyone who happens upon him.

This is my preferred treatment for spammers: simply pass laws stating that it is a positive defence against any criminal or civil charges that the victim was a spammer. Then, let the psychopaths take care of the problem for us.

There is a comprehensive Guide to Springfield, USA put together by careful watching of many, many Simpsons episodes. These guys have way too much time on their hands, but it’s still quite cool!

Last weekend I visited my brother Thomas in San Diego to celebrate my birthday; I’d a great time. San Diego has a pleasant climate and is incredibly attractive, although my opinion of downtown was mixed. My brother’s friends are pretty cool, though. Anyway, here’s a photo of us downtown:

Handsome pair, huh? The photo was taken at the Yard House in downtown San Diego. This place has a great selection and wonderful music (80s, classic rock &c.). The prices are steep, though.

freebooks.by.ru has a plethora of technical books available online, free of charge. Very nice indeed.

One of the most frequently hurled accusations against Bush has been that Iraq and al Qaeda were never linked, and that in fact Iraq never had anything to do with terrorism. This is frequently stated in the leftist press, but is it true?

The Washington Times notes the Iraq–al Qaeda link; so too did Clinton believe that Iraq and al Qaeda coöperate; the Council on Foreign Relations notes that Iraq sponsored terrorism; the Middle East Quarterly has written on Iraqi–Ansar al-Islam ties; so too has the Christian Science Monitor written about Iraq & Ansar al-Islam; the Daily Telegraph has reported on documents proving a link; the Telegraph has also noted a memo stating that one of the 11 September terrorists was trained in Saddam’s Iraq.

CNN note that the South has dominated American Idol. Naturally; Southerners are superior people.

Mark Pilgrim realises that free software is useful software. He had been blogging with Movable Type, which is proprietary but was free enough: a new version came out, the pricing got restrictive and he was stuck. But then he discovered WordPress, which is and always will be free.

I’m visiting my flyboy brother this weekend; it’s so pretty here in San Diego that even the roadside weeds are beautiful!

Well, today I am 26 years old: officially in my late twenties. I suppose that I might as well get measured for a coffin now. Also, lay in a stock of Metamucil and start outfitting a wardrobe consisting of pants which go to my chest, as well as buying an over-large car. Sigh…

I don’t know if this is true or not, but allegedly, a German couple who went to a fertility clinic after being childless for 8 years had not known about sex. I find it very difficult to believe—surely they would have figured it out at some point? I mean, one must have an absolute lack of hormones not to.

Ever been concerned about what life without the Internet might be like? Never fear—an Internet-less existence survival guide is here.

The Eye of Argon is the worst story ever written; submitted by a 16 year old to a science fiction contest, it proceeded to win the Worst Story award—and continued to win for fifteen straight years. It is horribly, painfully, mind-numbingly bad. And now The Eye of Argon gets the MST3K treatment. Will the world ever be the same again?

RFCs (Requests for Comments) are the working standards of the Internet; while a very few are eventually promoted to official Internet Standards, most never do, and yet are no less important for that. Some are superseded; some obsoleted; but most are still in effect.

RFC 1855: Netiquette Guidelines (dating back to 1995) is one such RFC. It’s an important document, and should be read by all newbies.

Its guidelines are not mandatory in letter but rather in spirit (e.g. I use underscores rather than asterisks to indicate emphasis in plain text). Much as a great poet knows when to break the rules, so too an experienced user knows when the time is right to do things differently. A newbie, though, should always follow the established pattern until he has the experience to know when not to.

Radley Balko illustrates the lunacy of the drug war and related phenomena: denying a dying man a shot of whiskey; imprisoning a multiple sclerosis sufferer for 25 years because he bought painkillers; handcuffing a threatening the terminally ill. Those who prosecute the War on Some Drugs; those who are prohibitionists of whatever sort; those whose goal in life is to deny personal liberty: these are animals.

Rupert Sessions managed to waste all his money—money which could have cared for his disabled wife—and run up tremendous debts in a Nigerian scam. And the man won’t even admit that he was fooled!

Everyone has seen those awful 419 scam-spams in which some supposedly-rich person needs one’s help to retrieve some ungodly sum of money, and is willing to let one have a huge chunk of it—oh, but there’s some front money first…

Well scamming the scammers has become a kind of new game. One of the most popular is the Lovecraftian anti-scam, first pioneered by steerp1ke; a variant is the disembodied head of Thomas Mallory.

Not technically a 419 scam, but just as annoying, are the folks who send spams begging for money for some non-existent cause. One anti-scammer managed to convince the scammer to pose with a loaf of bread on his head. Although this one almost worries me—what if the fellow is on the up-and-up, but is completely ignorant of netiquette (and thus believes that sending millions of people email is A-OK)?

419 Eater actually has an entire section of photos the scammers sent of themselves.

Today I discovered that I’ve lost so much weight that I can slip my suit trousers off without unzipping or unbuttoning them. I’m going to have to have them tailored down to size. That’s a good problem to have!

I just finished watching Un Homme et Une Femme, a film by Claude Lelouch from ’66. It’s been lying on my coffee table for a few weeks, ever since Netflix sent it me; I’d been avoiding it because I’d a premonition that it’d be some long, boring 60s-sh Froggy film like Claire’s Kneed (’71); Rohmer had his moments (his Four Seasons cycle is superb) but that was not one of them. Quite the contrary: it’s really quite the masterpiece. Very touching, very sweet, very believable—and very romantic. Not to be commended enough.

The reader may recall my post back in December in which I made good bread; well, I have done it again nearly half-a-year later. This was my recipe: 2¼ cups (3×¾ cups) flour; 1 cup hot water from the tap; a ¼ oz. packet of yeast; a good dollop of honey, a splash of white wine vinegar and a splash of olive oil; mix all but water well; add water; mix into a dough; knead; let rise for 30 minutes, punch down, rise another 15; put into a bread pan and let rise for 30 minutes; bake at 375° for 45 minutes. It’s amazing stuff; next time I’ll use my homemade vinegar and more honey, but otherwise I’m quite pleased. Here’s a picture of the finished product:

I’m eating it with all sorts of preserves which I’ve had stuck in my fridge for ages. Now that I truly know how to bake bread, I can make it anytime I please. Life is good.

In a small German-speaking region of a canton in Switzerland, a card game called Troggu is played. It appears doomed to die out, which is a real pity, since it appears to be both simple and a lot of fun. I’ll have to see if I can get a deck and teach it to some folks.

I just bought myself a Happy Hacking Keyboard (actually, the Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2, to be completely exact); it’s a small keyboard which cuts the unwieldy 101-or-so-key standard layout down to a much more manageable 64. It has an incredibly small footprint (4.7" × 11.6") and does things the Right Way: there is no accurséd Caps Lock key (the Control key goes there, as God intended); the Esc is next to the 1 and the tilde/backtick is above the Backspace. Despite its small size, the keys themselves are full-size. My hands needn’t travel nearly so far anymore. The keyboard is a complete joy to use. Here’s a picture of it; notice my hand at left:

Pretty sweet, huh?

The first legal batch of whiskey made in Colorado has been distilled. I wish these guys all the best luck.

The editors of the National review make some excellent points about Abu Ghraib. Among them are that the world didn’t care when it was Saddam who tortured his own people (giving the lie to the Left’s claims of moral superiority—they merely care about making a political point) and that the US reacted very quickly to the allegations: three days after a soldier reported abuse, a criminal investigation was announced; three days thereafter an administrative investigation was commenced. The media made a big story out of it after the problem was well in hand, effectively locking the stall after the horse had long been gone.

Today marks the four-year anniversary of my graduation from Austin College. I’ve now spent as many years in the real world as I spent in college. In my morose moments I like to refer to the 14th of May 2000 as Black Sunday, but when I reflect on the order of things I recognise that it’s necessary to move on in life: one cannot be a student forever, or indeed remain in any state for too long a time.

But man was college fun. I was surrounded by friends & familiar faces (and pretty girls—Texas, quite frankly, rocks in that department). There were parties all the time. Twenty dollars was a lot of money, capable of securing anything one’s heart might have desired. My major concern was writing papers, which is easy once one has discovered the key. I had no mortgage, no rent, no gas, electric or light bills. Granted, I was racking up student-loan debt—but I didn’t think about it, and thus it might as well have not existed.

But of course the day comes when one must grow up. Moving to the next stage of life is never pleasant: birth requires labour (is it any wonder the newly-born infant screams?); physical maturity requires adolescence; and mental maturation requires graduation, leaving one’s friends behind and a lot of hard work and sacrifice. In the adult world, one doesn’t have the option of just racking up some more loans. Twenty dollars is only a lot of money to spend on oneself; it’s nothing compared to what one must expend to stay alive. Time is a precious commodity, and there’s never enough in the day. Eventually one realises that there will never be enough time: some things will never get done, and an unpleasant triage must be performed as one prioritises one’s life.

It’s not all bad, of course: things which were beyond imagination in school are now possible (e.g. a year and a half ago, I dropped everything and headed to London when airfares dropped to nearly naught); one has more options, more freedoms; one contributes to the world, rather than merely taking from it.

And of course the process doesn’t stop. I suppose that the next step in life is marriage, which brings along its own sacrifices and joys, and then after that parenthood with its own complement, and eventually retirement, which if planned right should be the great playground of life. I imagine that the key to happiness is to appreciate the memory of past stages of life, enjoy the present and anticipate the future—but I’m too gloomy a soul for that.

When I was 21, I rather thought that I’d be somewhat further along in life at 25 than I actually am: making six figures; owning a home; married; driving a new car; surrounded by friends. As it is I’m still quite firmly in the five-figure range (although I’m in the respectable end thereof); I don’t own a house but I do own a condo; I’m single, and expect to remain so in the foreseeable future; my car is thirteen years old, the same I had my senior year of college; and I’m just beginning to form a circle of friends here in Denver. Still, life’s not too bad: I manage to sock away about 20% of my salary, and so I have the expectation of a pleasant retirement in my dwindling years (a good four dozen years from now); I have a respectable job; I serve in a modest capacity at church; my health is excellent; certainly, I (and just about anyone reading this, for that matter) am better off than almost anyone who has ever lived throughout all history.

But rare is the day I don’t wish, at least a little bit, that I had yet to cross that stage and receive my diploma.

squidfingers has some very cool tilable patterns free for use.

It runs out that domestic music sales are up approximately 10% this year, not down 7% as the RIAA has tried to claim. They are shipping fewer units to stores (that’s what’s down), but more units are actually selling (and that’s what makes money). Indeed, given that units-shipped is an expense and units-sold is money made, they are essentially complaining that they have cut expenses!

Imagine that last year I shipped 1,728 CDs and sold 1,296—that would mean that I made 432 too many, at some cost to me. This year I ship 1,584 and sell 1,440, thus making only 144 too many, at a lower cost to me. And I make more money, because I’ve actually sold more units. My expenses are down and my profits are up; would I have any grounds to complain to anyone?

The RIAA must be suppressed.

After World War II, veterans in McMinn County, Tennessee, overthrew a corrupt sheriff. They had tried to have a fair election, but he and his deputies confiscated ballots, shot a black man for trying to vote and generally made nuisances of themselves. So the GIs and other local men armed themselves and advanced on the jail where the crooked sheriff and his men were holed up. They won.

I’m generally dubious of claims that private firearms ownership helps overthrow tyranny; the last time that was tried we lost and suffered a century of defeat. But in this case it seems to have worked.

Leonid Stadnyk is the world’s tallest living man, but rather than bask in fame he sufferes in poverty, anonymity and loneliness. His sad story has been reported by CNN, The Guardian and The Age. The poor fellow cannot work, cannot travel and cannot even afford shoes. He’ll never marry, and when his mother dies he’ll be unable to provide for himself.

More pictures are at ArtUkraine.com. If he isn’t a convincing argument for charity, I don’t know what is.

Senator Zell Miller (D., Georgia) wishes to repeal the 17th Amendment. That’s the farce which requires that senators be popularly elected and unaccountable, rather than selected by state legislatures and directed in their votes. He’ll almost certainly fail, but it’s a noble effort.

The old saw goes that if one locked an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite length of time, eventually they’d produce the complete works of Shakespeare. The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator attempts to test this.

weather.com saved money by switching to Linux, Tomcat and other free software. Your company can too.

I do disagree with their use of MySQL; it’d be much smarter to go with PostgreSQL, which is a much better, database—which is also free.

A young Iraqi has a blog entitled Iraq the Model. His English is imperfect, but it’s an interesting look at what’s going on over there.

Back in July ’03, Max Boot wrote on the challenges & opportunities we face in the upcoming years with regards to our military. A most interesting article.

A CNN articles notes that less than half of adults or children wear bike helmets. Well, duh. They look stupid, they are uncomfortable, they don’t protect the important parts and they are dumb. Wearing a bike helmet is like going hiking in a gambeson, because one might trip and fall. Every time one wears a helmet, one looks like a twit: every single time, without fail. But one doesn’t need a helmet every time; in fact, the odds are good that one will never need the idiotic thing—but if one wears it, one will look like an ever-loving fool for hundreds or thousands of miles.

Helmets don’t even protect the important parts, either: they leaves the eyes, nose, teeth & cheeks open to injury. It hurts to break teeth, lose an eye, shatter one’s nose or tear open one’s cheek.

Sure, if one is racing, then a helmet is a wise choice. Sure, if one is one dangerous roads, or mountain biking, it’s a good idea. But why look less than one’s best needlessly?

Tonight we took my mom to dinner to celebrate Mother’s Day (late because of the party for the ordination yesterday). Dinner at Le Central was amazing as always. I’d an iceberg salad with blue cheese dressing & pickled onions, followed by Beef Wellington and some sort of cupcake for dessert, along with an excellent wine which smelled of cigar boxes and tasted of strawberries and a very nice decade-old port.

Electric Bikes Northwest sell bicycles with built-in motors meant to augment, not supplant, human power. The motor kicks in to give one that extra power needed to climb a hill or maintain 25 mph, but one still pedals. That way, one still gets the exercise and cost benefits of a bicycle while not arriving at one’s destination all sweaty and an hour late. Extremely cool; my next bike might be one of these.

I’m thinking of adding AiYo to this blog. It’s a sidebar which shows products I’ve recently written about and reviewed; if readers of Octopodial Chrome follow the links and purchase, I get a small cut. Does anyone have any thoughts—is this kosher, or is taking advantage?

My gut reaction is that it’s not a bad thing, since readers can ignore it if they choose.

I recently purchased the DVD Every Breath You Take, a newly-remastered collection of The Police’s best. It is absolutely incredible: the quality is amazing; the music sounds like it never did before; there’s a kind of liveliness to it all which is breathtaking. DVD Audio is the wave of the future, mark my words. I first noticed this at my buddy Phil’s: he’d recently purchased an REM disc with Losing My Religion on it (incidentally, losing my religion is an old Southern phrase for losing one’s temper—it has naught to do with atheism); we heard instruments we’d never heard before. I’ve since experienced the Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over which is awe-inspiring. I’m running out of superlatives here, so I’ll end with this brief note: go out and buy a surround-sound system and DVD player now.

Deroy Murdock argues against the War on Some Drugs. He notes:

• Persecution of a California couple, growing marijuana for medical use in California, using California water—all of which is legal in California—being persecuted under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, despite there being no interstate commerce going on!
• Prohibition of ephedrine, a dietary supplement linked to 155 deaths in eleven years—fewer than Tylenol.
• Attempts to make the most effective and popular pain-killer more difficult to get, since after all we can’t have folks relieving their pain.

None of these things directly effects anyone but those who uses them. None of these things is therefor the business of the State. And yet we continue to persecute people, secure in a blind moral high-handedness. When will this madness stop?

My buddy Dean’s brother George was ordained a deacon today. Unfortunately, although I brought my camera I’ve no pictures—I never got the chance for a photo good enough to merit interrupting the service. I’m hoping to receive a copy of one with all the clergy (three deacons, five priests and a metropolitan; the last is the equivalent of a Roman Catholic cardinal) in front of the rood screen. Despite the length of the service—matins, liturgy, ordination, memorial service & blessing of the bread—it went quite quickly. It’s great to see him finally taking the first permanent step on his way to the priesthood. Axios!

pizza_party is a command-line interface to Domino’s web ordering system; now it’s possible to order a pizza without bothering to fire up a browser! It can remember your favourite pizzas, be used to order many different pizzas (say, for a corporate gathering) and is distributed under the General Public License, so it’s free software. Could one ask for anything more?

James Hague argues that on modern computer systems, performance tuning is different from what one might expect—more concerned with algorithms and other such high-level optimisations than with language choice, tweaking and such low-level approaches. A very good read.

Way back when, Marathon was a great game for the Macintosh. Released at about the same time as Doom, it featured an intriguing story as well as exceptional gameplay. Future versions upped the ante in the story-telling realm considerably; some still count Marathon among the greatest of games purely for its story. I wasted a considerable number of hours playing the trilogy in college.

Before its maker—Bungie, of lamented memory—was bought by Microsoft, they freed the source to Marathon, and after Marathon, Marathon 2 and Marathon ∞, we now have Marathon Aleph One (math geeks wil recognise that Aleph One is the power of the continuum, which is larger than simple infinity…). Very, very cool.

It’s a little-known fact that inflating one’s tyres makes a world of difference when riding a bicycle. If they were at, say, 24 PSI when they should have been at 40–65, it’s amazing how much smoother the ride is, and how much less effort is required. Something I noticed yesterday, and had confirmed today. Why, it’s almost as easy to bike to & from work as to drive. Now.

I love Boulder. It’s the greatest place on earth. And cool, too.

The bike paths! The girls! The beer! The girls! The food! Also, the girls. And the library. What a wonderful place. For lunch I’d a burger & a beer at the Mountain Sun. After work I had a few beers, rode more than a dozen miles & strolled through an interesting old cemetery. Boulder is so cool.

Bastich was a webcomic I read whilst in college. It ran only from 1995–1998, but man was it funny back then. I recommend it, from what I recollect as a dim 20 year old. I still remember when it stopped being updated. I kept on re-visiting, hoping against hope to see a new comic. Sigh.

Is there anything finer than a summer evening just after the sun has sunk below the horizon, but before it has gotten dark—what I believe our Anglo-Saxon ancestors called hador? Is there aught better than that soft silence, that still sweetness, that feeling that all the world is repairing itself from the day’s endeavours? It’s the most romantic time, when one feels as though one were a youth once more, and all the world were one’s oyster, when anything was possible and everything would be done. I would give anything to live my life in that cool twilight.

CNN reports that a father-and-son team are attempting to clone our nation’s champion trees (the biggest, and often oldest, of their kind) in an effort to revitalise forests by reintroducing their genetic material. A brilliant idea. I wonder if they take donations?

Steven Pinker has written a new book which argues that our genes are most responsible for who we are—which is yet more evidence for aristocracy. If we can breed hunting dogs, why can we not breed leaders? The answer, of course, is that we can.

The Russian site All of MP3 offers legal and cheap music downloads. You may be responsible for paying customs duties, though—I’m not certain how the law covers downloading across national lines. Still, very cool.

You pay by the megabyte—$5 per 500MB, and let them know what format you want the music in: MP3, OGG, WMA &c., as well as your desired bitrate, and suddenly you’re in like Flint. Heck, if you want you can download CD-quality music (for about $6.50 per disc). Very cool.

After a far-too-long hiatus (with the exception of a chicken cooked in broth from a mediæval recipe) from cooking, I’m back at it. My buddy Dean gave me a shoulder of lamb (bone with scraps of meat) from his Easter party, and I’m making my famous bean soup from it. Interestingly, after several hours of simmering, the broth from the bones & meat was white—I’ve never seen that before. The aroma is quite strong, as one would expect from lamb, but as the soup cooks away it is mellowing into something quite tasty.

Well, it’s the last day in April and it’s snowing. Golly, I do love Colorado. One can only hope that we get snow in May.

I recall when I was in college down in Texas that the gals would start laying out in their bikinis in late March/early April; here we are almost to collegiate finals-time, and it’s snowing. Of course, we also get nasty hot weather as well (the first half of this week was hella hot): can it get better than girls in bikinis in the morning and girls in sweaters in the evening? I really don’t think so.

Colorado: you know you want to live here.

Ben Shapiro notes the slanders, libels and calumny of the leftist press and its readers in regards to the deceased Pat Tillman: they label him a dumb jock who was blinded by nationalist mythology. They celebrate the death of that fine man.

Animals! Mewling malcontents! Beasts! Pox-ridden perverts! They should be censured—but they will not be. They should be decried—but they will not be. They should be ashamed—but they will never be. A plague take them all!

Jeff Jacoby supports the ban on photos of soldiers’ coffins. His reasoning is that it is disrespectful to show photos of those anonymous coffins, that the photos utterly dehumanising. He’s incorrect: it’s not the photos that are dehumanising, but war itself. He writes:

They reduce Americans who died for their country to an abstraction. They deprive them of every shred of their individuality and personality. They turn them into nothing more than an icon—a seven-foot box covered with an American flag, just like every other seven-foot, flag-covered box in every other picture of caskets coming off a C-5 cargo plane at Dover Air Force Base.

The truth of the matter is: that’s what they are. For every one of those men, every hope, every dream, every effort of his parents to raise him well, every love, every pain, everything about him: all those things have been reduced to an anonymous seven-foot box. That’s the great tragedy of war. Even when done for the very best of reasons, it’s a terrible thing.

Peter Norvig wrote an excellent article entitle Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years which faces the reality that no skill—particularly one so complex as programming.

Elton John thinks that the voting on American Idol is racist. The issue is that the three contestants who got the lowest number of votes happen to be black (incidentally, the show is more popular with blacks than whites). What’s not mentioned by Elton John (because he’s a twerp) is that there is a much simpler explanation: the three black gals did poorly in the votes because they did so well in fact. How can this be? The answer is that the vote-for-your-favourite system (formally called plurality voting) breaks down when there are more than two contestants. Let’s imagine that there are three contestants: A, whose fans prefer B slightly to B, but well over C; B, whose fans prefer him slightly over A but well over C; and C, whose fans prefer him over the other two about equally (this could be the case in a contest between Brahms, Mozart and Madonna). Madonna might win with 35% of the vote when Brahms got 32% and Mozart 33%. Would that mean that she was the favourite of the contest? Of course not—60% of the voters disliked her. Amusing, a similar contretemps occurred on Pop Idol, the English show which gave birth to American Idol, when I was in London last.

The problem gets worse as the numbers increase. Jef Raskin has written on this; the solution is instant runoff voting. Voters rank their preferences, and if there is no majority winner then the least-voted for alternative is removed, and for each of his voters we change his vote to be for the next-ranked candidate. This continues until there is a majority candidate.

In the example above, there would be no clear majority winner, so Brahms would be knocked off (having only gotten 32% of the vote) and each of his voters would be transferred to that voter’s second choice. 95% of Brahms voters would prefer Mozart to Madonna, so Mozart would now have 33% + 95% × 32% = 63.4%, and Madonna would have 35% + 5% × 32% = 36.6%. Mozart would be the clear winner.

We saw this happen in the ’92 election, when Perot stole enough votes from Bush that Clinton won (most Perot voters would have preferred Bush to Clinton); we saw it happen again in ’00 when Nader stole enough votes from Gore that Bush won (luckily for our nation, but still not the fair result). I saw it happen in college, when the options on the designated smoking area for our dorm were: kitchen; game room; lobby; computer lab; no smoking area. The majority preferred a smoking area, but the votes were scattered about, and the anti-smoking minority won.

Instant runoff voting is not perfect (Kenneth Arrow has demonstrated that it is impossible for there to be a fair voting system), but it is much better than plurality voting.

Of course, the deeper question is why anyone bothers to watch such claptrap.

Andrew Stuttaford writes about Micheal Martin, the tobacco-hating fiend of Ireland. He labels him, this nanny, this ninny, this drone, this nosey, hectoring clown. Bravo!

I just finished watching Guns n Roses’ Use Your Illusion I life from Tokyo (one hasn’t lived until one has heard ten thousand Japanese shouting Guns and Loses!). There were two noteworthy items. First was just how talented a band GnR really were. The second was how gay Axl Rose was. The man pranced—pranced!—about in extremely tight, extremely short shorts. He flirted coquettishly with the camera. He minced about in a fashion certain to embarrass Nathan Lane. It was painful to watch.

But man was the music good.

Neil Boortz writes about the Federal Censorship Commission and the implications for free speech. As he notes, today the concentration is on content of a sexual nature, but the seeds for control of political content have already germinated. He also points out that not once has anyone accused Howard Stern of violating anyone’s rights to life, liberty or property.

On Thursday I received the digital camera I had ordered last weekend. It rocks, completely and totally. The photo of the snow on Friday was taken with it; I am slowly but surely recording various things I wish to remember, but don’t wish to keep lying around the house. And example is a bottle of 2000 Fuler’s Vintage Ale (number 59,497) which I drank on the 13th of February: as cool as it is, I’ve no need for the bottle to lie around the house. Now, I have a photo and can toss the thing itself.

The camera is a Fujifilm A330: 3.2 megapixels; 3x optical zoom and optical viewfinder. It works with Linux (a standard USB mass storage device) and takes very nice photos. I highly recommend it.

D. Daniel Andriës has written an icon & Quenya translation of the Hail Mary. It is one of only a few Tengwar icons in existence.

As to the question of whether or not it is appropriate to do such a thing, I cannot see why not. Although Tolkien’s languages and alphabets were invented, they are no less real for that. If God can be praised in Russian, surely He can be praised in Quenya or Sindarin. Tolkien translated most of the Our Father into Sindarin and Quenya (calligraphy by the same artist). In fact, one could even argue that by deliberately using the invented language & alphabet that one is being more intentional about what one is doing than when using one’s own tongue. It’s much like praying in Liturgical Greek, Church Slavonic or Syriac—for most of those who use them, they are meaningless of themselves, but meaningful in how they are used.

I myself have often thought that it would be fun to write the entire Bible—in English—using the Tengwar.

Plus, it’s just cool to see Theotokos and Tolkien in the same paragraph (or, as here, in the same sentence).

I discovered the source of the Pentagon silliness I wrote about earlier. The Memory Hole (site is very slow at the moment; I should note that I do not agree with what seem to be its political views) requested the photos under the Freedom of Information Act. Yesterday I viewed many of the 361 photographs (again, at this time the site is nearly unusable). None of them are offensive in any way (they were, after all, taken by Air Force photographers); they tend to be much like this:

In fact, the images are well-taken, and will in the future no doubt be seen in museums covering our time. I can see no reason why they should be suppressed.

Note: I have been informed that the Air Force mis-sent photos of the arrival of the Columbia astronauts along with those of soldiers. Although the site does not reliably indicate which is which, I judge that those with dress uniform are most likely the astronauts, and those in BDUs are most likely soldiers.

I recently saw quote by the English poet Norman Douglas, and was struck by his dates of birth and death. Born 1868, he passed away in 1952. The latter is the year my parents were born: I know them, and they almost certainly lived at the same time as someone (if not him, another) who had lived when Robert E. Lee did. For that matter, my grandparents lives overlapped with that of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It’s odd how long a century is, and yet how quickly passes.

I recently found the Yuni Library of Latin Phrases, which is an invaluable reference guide to all manner of useful phrases. I highly recommend it.

Many have written, far better than I could, about the recent death of Pat Tillman, but I feel I must put in my own two cents. What strikes me the most about him is this: from what I can tell, he was a true paragon of the manly virtues. He fulfilled the old saying, mens sana in corpore sano: while a good football player, he was also an excellent student (graduating summa cum laude with a GPA of 3.84). Despite being offered $9 million by another team, he felt a loyalty to the team which had given him his first professional chance, and turned the offer down. He married his high school sweetheart, but enlisted after their honeymoon because he felt called to serve. Through it all, though, he was modest—the one common theme which runs through the many articles being written is that he didn’t hold press conferences, he didn’t seek publicity: he just gave up $3.6 million to fight for his country.

The vice president of his team noted, in sports we have a tendency to overuse terms like courage and bravery and heroes, and then someone like Pat Tillman comes along and reminds us what those terms really mean. That’s the truth (on both sides: athletes tend to have delusions of grandeur about what are essentially children’s games). True heroism is not passively accepting what happens to one (that’s why those killed on 11 September ’01 cannot be considered heroes, save for those who actually stood and fought); rather, heroism is actively taking a stand for what is right, no matter the potential or actual cost. Pat Tillman did that: he gave up a promising career; he gave up time with his wife; he gave up his life.

Requiescat in pace.

This was the view off my balcony this morning:

I had to dig a sweater out of storage and take my overcoat & hat off their pegs (always a good day when I can wear that coat). When I left my house, my car had over six inches of snow on it. A lot wetter than our normal powder, which is a right nuisance. Gosh, Colorado weather is interesting. And by interesting I mean weird.

This article has been retracted.

At work we use a chat product called Sametime. It’s not very good, but being able to instantly communicate with one’s colleagues is very helpful. At home I use gaim to use both Jabber and AIM (the latter of which is loathsome but popular). Using chat programs so often has led me to consider how there are different rules of spelling & punctuation.

The basic rule of chat is economy. Don’t waste bandwidth; don’t waste time hitting more keys than necessary; and don’t over-annoy your correspondent.

In normal hand-written communication, if one misspells a word, one indicates the proper spelling in some fashion (perhaps by inserting the proper letter, or crossing out the misspelled word and rewriting it), so as to demonstrate education. In emails, of course, one just corrects the spelling. But when chatting, one shouldn’t bother to send a new message with the corrected spelling, as it merely annoys one’s correspondent by alerting him (via a raised window, a beep or some other indication of the incoming message) and disturbing his work for a null-content transmission. Education is assumed when chatting; typos are simply the side-effect of such rapid communication. When the error is so bad as to lead to misunderstanding, or is so egregious as to be embarrassing, a simple =CORRECTION suffices.

Capitalisation, too, is almost always dispensed with. To type a capital letter, one must use two keystrokes instead of one. The only instance where capitalisation is properly used is to indicate respect, as when typing God, or perhaps a dearly loved one’s name.

Common words and phrases are often abbreviated: thx for thanks, np for no problem, l8r for later &c. These are not misspellings but shorthand, and there’s no shame in using them.

Punctuation, too, is affected by the rules of chatting. Final punctuation may be omitted if and only if it is superfluous. A period serves solely to indicate this is a normal sentence, and is over now; well, the end-of-message serves that purpose perfectly well, and thus a final period may be omitted. An exclamation point, on the other hand, indicates that an otherwise-normal sentence is not only ending, but carries some emphasis; in its absence there is significant ambiguity, and so an exclamation point may never be omitted. The question mark is an interesting case (one so complex that I fear that my—normally quite intelligent—brother cannot grasp it): in some cases an interrogative sentence may be ambiguous and in others not. The rule here is to use the question mark if needed, but not otherwise. For example, the sentence Where is Jim? is so clearly asking a question that only an ape would need the question mark—and thus only a simian would think it mandatory. OTOH, the sentence You’re coming to dinner may be asking a question or not, and thus the question mark is necessary. Of course, such interrogatory declaratives should be avoided in normal writing, but in the informal atmosphere of chat they are quite acceptable, and even to be praised for their economy.

I suppose that in Spanish, which prefixes exclamatory and interrogatory sentence with the appropriate marks, one could omit the final punctuation, since there would be no ambiguity. Regardless, inter-sentence punctuation can never be omitted, ever, nor can intra-sentence punctuation. Omitting apostrophes is a sin against God and man.

In general, one should attempt to cram as much information as seemly into a message, no more and no less. Over-long messages are difficult to read quickly: the ideal message is comprehended in the blink of an eye. Over-short messages mean that one sends in three or four messages what should have been in a single transmission, causing the recipient to be swamped with incoming notifications. This is quite rude, as it assumes that one’s correspondent has nothing to do but wait for one’s messages, and is so dedicated to this that he has turned off all notifications (e.g. window-raising, bell-sounding or visual bells). Avoid it all costs.

Of course, one can choose to be more formal, perhaps to get one’s point across. But I like to do so sparingly—to constantly capitalise sentences, use final punctuation &c. comes across as pretentious.

It’s an interesting subject, I think. I wonder what different rules be come into being with future rules of communication.

Today’s is marked by some as Earth Day. Sally C. Pipes notes that our environment is doing quite extraordinarily well, due in no small part to the fact that we are increasingly wealthy. But for my part, I find the whole thing silly. Celebrating the planet smacks of paganism at best and silliness at worst. Stuff-and-nonsense.

Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli who converted to Christianity and revealed that state’s secret nuclear program (which I suppose counts as treason, but then so too were Rommel and Solzhenitsyn to their respective governments) was released today. He had left the country before telling what he knew, but was drugged, kidnapped and dragged back to Israel to stand trial, instead of being properly extradited (a habit with the Israelis, who think they are above international law—cf. the USS Liberty). Firm supporter of freedom, the rule of law and general decency my foot!

Terence Jeffrey reports on California, where mountain lions are stalking man, particularly children. The state issues all sorts of advice about how to scare a mountain lion (clear brush from children’s play areas; pick up kids so they don’t panic & run) but doesn’t advice—in fact has made illegal—the best advice for dealing with predators: kill them. Were I a parent, I sure as hell wouldn’t passively let a mountain lion devour my kids; rather, I’d quite cheerfully and preemptively give it a nasty case of lead poisoning.

Who was given mastery over the world: man or beast?

An aborigine woman in Australia placed a curse on her prime minister because he wishes to reform the commission which oversees aborigine issue. She had better hope that naught untoward happens to him; there would be very good grounds to try her for malicious witchcraft.

Speaking of which, historically the Roman Church vacillated between two positions: either there is no such thing as witchcraft, and thus it is foolish to prosecute it; or it exists, but it is only a civil matter when harmful. So far as I know, not a single witch trial was for practising magic—they all were for harming others thereby. Something the neo-pagans with their utterly insane talk of Burning Times don’t like to admit (although the more intellectually honest ones will).

Anyway, it shows great irresponsibility and a lack of seriousness for the chairman of the commission to cheer on such action. Utterly ridiculous.

The Romans marked the passing of the months by a complex reckoning originally related to the phases of the moon. In time and as a solar calendar was introduced, it calcified into quite an interesting artifact of an earlier time.

The first day of the month was the Kalends; the seventh (in March, May, July & October) or fifth (in other months) was the Nones; the fifteenth (in March, May, July & October) or thirteenth (in the other months) was the Ides; the rest of the days of the month were numbered by counting backward from the next named day. The named day counted as 1, the day before it as 2 and so on. The day before a named day was called Pridie Name. Oddly enough, this means that the second half of a month was named after the Kalends of the following month.

Thus, 1 January would be the Kalends of January; 31 December would be I Kalends January; 2 January would be IV Nones January, and so on. Here’s a sample calendar for April & May of this year:

As you can see, today is the Twelfth Kalends of May. Now you can reckon time as a Roman!

Well, my car has been producing smoke recently, and I was finally able to take it by the mechanic’s to find out what’s wrong. Well, I’m essentially rebuilding the engine (a true rebuild would involve a bit more, but…). As expensive as this is, it’s cheaper than buying a new car, so I’ve little choice. If the light rail line down here were ready, I would consider not fixing it, and only using the car when necessary, but as there’s no good public transportation (despite RTD’s absurd claim that they are best in the US) I’ve little choice.

Since my car is in the shop (a tale for another entry), I walked home from work today (having hitched a ride in). ’Twas well worth it: as I strode along, at one point I was nearly overpowered by the most magnificent perfume flowing from flowers planted along the side of the road. In my car I’d never have noticed that.

That reminds me of how in my old place I’d walk to the light rail station (a 30–40 minute stroll) in the winter, and once was privileged to see the most notable thing: water frozen as it poured forth from a gutter and onto a plant. It was like the most splendid sculpture ever, with facets and scintillations galore—and I was the only one to see it. One wonders how much one misses, being in the glass & steel cocoon so often.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that it’s now cheaper to scrap a new car than replace it, due primarily to over-use of air-bags and other non-reusable parts. Is there anything which can be done? Probably not: it’s the very things we (or our elected representative) find desirable that drives up the cost of repair so badly.

…because her son drove a car into a light pole at 90 mph. Naturally, it couldn’t possibly have been her darling little angel’s fault—it was because Coors glorif[ies] a culture of youth, sex and glamour while hiding the dangers of alcohol abuse and addiction. She also sued her son’s girlfriend, who lent him the car, and the girl’s mother, who had given the girl the car. What a supreme lackwit.

Coors makes a rotten product, but it’s not their fault in a legal sense—and probably not in a moral sense—if that product is misused. Although they do sell it as fit for human consumption, which is a bit of an exaggeration.

I recently played several games of FreeCiv, a free clone of the game civilisation. One starts out the game without even knowledge of pottery, and slowly works up to nuclear armament and interstellar missions.

The best part is that instant when one has won—not when one’s enemies have been defeated yet, but when victory is a certainty. There’s a point at which one becomes invincible, when superiority is attained, when triumph is a mere matter of time. I love that feeling.

Otherwise, not really a game I can take much interest in. Still, glad to have played it.

The last funeral of the War Between the States is being held down in South Carolina today. I agree with Carl McClung that it’s a travesty to fly US flags: the crew of the Hunley died in the service of their country (which was not the United States) shortly after sinking a ship belong to those said United States. Like every single Southerner of their time, they were robbed of their freedom; like far too many Southerners, they were robbed of their lives; why must they be robbed of their dignity? Additionally, Mr. Smith (the author of the article) is wrong: the crew were not American heroes but Southern; the first submariners to sink an enemy warship in combat were Southerners, which is something far finer.

A dear cousin once removed has sent me an interesting article which notes that math whizzes coördinate both sides of the brain better than others. Not surprising, really—after all, math is the pinnacle of both art and science, the next best thing to theology. It is the zenith of intellectual endeavour. Additionally, one will note that mathematicians tend to appreciate the arts far more than artists appreciate math—and far more than lesser scientists appreciate art (although as a rule scientists appreciate art more than artists do science; scientists tend to be more complete human beings).

An old article notes that Tim Berners-Lee received his knighthood at New Years. Also interesting is a photo of Eric Clapton sans beard—proof positive that a man needs facial hair to be a man.

CNN has an article about Burundis who stood against the genocides of the mid-90s (genocides which Clinton did naught against—not that it’s the US president’s job). Reading the article, it’s amazing how primitive the whole thing sounds. It’s like reading English history from a thousand years ago (speaking of which, should I be unfortunate enough to live to be 88, I shall see the millennial anniversary of the Norman invasion). Africa’s a miserable continent—a Middle East to make the actual Middle East seem as naught. But no-one cares about a bunch of black skilling one another.

I showed my folks my Italian wardrobe this evening, and I’m afraid to say that they hate it—the braghetta (codpiece) at least. Silly, really, considering that it’s quite within spec, as shown in the picture below, c. 1499–1503:

Mine’s actually slightly more modest, so I figure I’m alright. Parents!

It was ten years ago that Canter & Siegel sent their Usenet spam. I remember reading rec.games.bolo (or was it alt.netgames.bolo back then?) and wondering what this strange advertisement was. I was more bemused than annoyed at the time: it was so odd that someone would try to advertise online. It was as though some stranger walked up ton one on the street trying to shill a jet fighter to one.

IMHO the best solution to the spam problem is to resort to the old English punishment of outlawing: and outlaw is outside the protection of the law; whatever anyone does to him is legal. Defraud a spammer, steal his car, assault him: it’d all be legal.

Mac Owens thinks that victory in Vietnam was possible. I’ve thought so for a long time, not that I know anything whatsoever about war-fighting.

An Englishman sold all he owned, went to Vegas, bet everything on Red and won. Mondo foolish, but pretty cool anyway.

Robert Littell arranged for his son’s saviour to attend college in thanks. Akhdan Susarov was driving Jonathan Littell about Chechnya when they were set upon by gunmen; by some clever driving he managed to elude them while another car in their convoy was less fortunate.

How very old-fashioned: the man called up his old college, made some connections and next thing one knows, young Susarov is a student. Good for them all! We need more old-fashioned folks in this world.

My buddy Dean hosted an Easter party at his & his wife’s home yesterday. It more than beat my alternative plan of watching Netflix movies until midnight, then going to sleep. What a fun bunch of folks he knows, from his co-workers to his friends to his in-laws. A great time was had by all.

Which is to say, my hope yesterday came to fruition: this morning the sun came up and burnt away the clouds and snow; it’s now a very nice day. All creation celebrates this great day: Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

Michigan has trampled upon a Detroit family which ran a lottery game. Nowhere in the article is it stated that the family was dishonest in their business dealings; in fact, it notes that the payoff was greater than that for the state game. But Leviathan demands his monopoly, and will devour anyone who stands in his way.

For my part, should it indeed be the case the family were as honest as Michigan is, my hope is that every one of those involved in taking them down be stricken with some horrid disease. Smallpox or syphilis, or bubonic plague or even uncontrollable chronic diarrhœa—something to make the point.

Today is Tax Freedom Day—every single day you’ve worked until today has been to support the government, whether of the federation, your state or your city. Hope that you feel it was worth it, because I sure as hell don’t.

According to CNN, St. George, Utah doesn’t want spring business any longer. To make their point, it is no longer possible for anyone under 21 to rent a hotel room, there is a midnight curfew for 18 year olds and anyone smoking under the age of19 faces fine. The wonderful quote from a member of their police force is, they can't have the fun they want to have here anymore.

What a bunch of jerks. They don’t deserve the money that spring break brought in for them. Not that I can understand why anyone would go to Utah for spring break. The damn place is too dry, too hot and full of Mormons to boot. Now, the tales I’ve heard of South Padre Island…

Not that I condone the modern Spring Break phenomenon. It takes what was once a vacation for Holy Week and perverts it rather terribly.

A local radio station has a so-called throwback weekend in which the songs are supposed oldies. Many of them post-date my arrival in college! That’s not an oldie, that’s a damned good song. It’s not an oldie until one is thirty or so.

OTOH, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom was released in 1995 before I was even in college. Frightening, that. And the 14th of May will mark the four-year anniversary of my graduation; the following day I will have spent more time out of school than in (well, full-time school anyway—I went to college for five years before going to college). I’m so old I might as well sleep in a coffin to save time for everyone: just nail on the lid should I happen to not wake up.

Blur’s Song 2 (you know, the one that goes Woo-hoo/I got my head checked/by a jumbo jet/it wasn’t easy/but nothing is) was released 10 Feb. 1997. I was a sophomore then. Sigh.

I can only imagine when I have to work with folks who were born after every event I find important or interesting. My co-workers are in the same boat: I do not believe a man of them is less than 36 years of age, and to tell the truth I’m not certain that any is less than 40. I don’t see how they can take me seriously. I know I couldn’t take someone seriously who had not heard Duran Duran when they actually played.

Yes, folks, it’s true—it’s Holy Saturday, but four days short of the middle of April, and we’re covered in snow. On Holy Thursday (the evening we mark the Crucifixion), what had been a pleasant week turned outright nasty: cold & blustery. Yesterday (the evening we mark Christ’s burial), it started snowing sometime in the afternoon, IIRC about 1500 (the ninth hour, when Christ died, according to the Gospels). And now creation is asleep under a blanket of snow.

It would be apt indeed if tomorrow the sun comes forth and destroys the snow as Christ destroyed Death.

I’ve added yet another bachelor recipe; this time the South Padre Island, a cocktail which is pretty much a tequila Cape Cod. I actually invented it on the 26th of August ’03, but I finally got around to writing it down in recipe form tonight.

Driving back from the grocer’s, I passed a Fantastic Sam’s (a unisex salon). There was the most attractive girl who’d just stepped out. For a moment I considered sacrificing my locks (three years’ growth; it’s been more than a year since the last time shears touch ’em) to the end of speaking with her. Perhaps fortunately, she was closing up shop, though, and so I remain a whole man.

But man, was she pretty!

When I stopped in at the supermarket to buy some wood glue to repair my desk, the clerk asked em for ID. Apparently it is the policy of the Albertson’s Corporation, or whatever their name is, not to sell wood glue to minors. Why? Are they afraid to encourage carpentry and woodworking amongst the young?

The only thing I can think of is that it’s a drug. But how does one use it? It’s hardly model æroplane cement.

We like short skirts!

While in Boulder today I saw a gal wearing a pleated skirt shorter than my hat size. ’Twas rather fetching, to tell the truth. All I can say is, we live in a wonderful time, a truly magnificent age.

Back in 1921 Lord Baden-Powell (I believe he was a lord) wrote about the Scouts’ Thanks Badge. Its design may surprise you…

Tonight I purchased a membership in the Society for Creative Anachronism, something I’d avoided doing ever since the non-member surcharge was instituted. I figure that, much as I might disagree with some of the Society’s methods, its goals are worthy. Plus, now that I’m a member I can whinge with the rest of ’em.

I’ve completed my calze, after an arduous day’s sewing. Now my set of fifteenth c. Italian clothing is basically done—everything else is gravy.

After beginning to diet back in August, I have managed to get my weight from a high of 183 down to 160! What’s my secret? Eat less—it’s that simple. I’ve still drunk beer, eaten fried foods and otherwise enjoyed myself; I’ve just been smart about it. Life is good.

Mona Charen writes illuminatingly on Sen. Kerry’s past half-truths and lies, as does David Limbaugh. The danger of this man—if that is the word for him—becoming President is very real. As much as I dislike Bush and disagree with his policies, Kerry is far, far worse. His grasp of economics is negligible; his concept of foreign policy is laughable; his understanding of the world is deservedly mocked. The man is a mite.

Persia has suffered under Islamist tyranny for twenty-five years today. Weird to think that it’s been that short a time. Perhaps in the next decade we can aim our sites on Persia, after we’ve straightened out Afghanistan and Mesopotamia.

Why can no-one nowadays create such lovely music as Dream Academy’s masterful cover of the Smith’s Please, Please, Please? If the reader does not recognise the piece, recall that wonderful interlude in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; it’s what is played as they wander the museum of art. Absolutely superb.

A Serb was sentenced to 17 years for the supposed murders of 228 Mohammedans back in ’92; the judge stated that the sentence should reflect all of the cruelty embodied in Darko Mrdja's participation.. By that reckoning, murdering one man should get 27 days. The Europeans have eliminated the death penalty—the only just punishment for rape, murder & treason—but apparently don’t seem bothered enough when someone kills others to punish him much at all.

All of this, of course, ignores the genocide of Christians in Bosnia, the destruction of our churches &c. But that’s normal: the world doesn’t give two figs when Mohammedans or Latins slay the Orthodox.

As CNN reports, a Mohammedan girl was suspended for wearing a scarf to a public school which requires students to doff hats. This is ridiculous; would a Jew be forced to remove his hat? Would an Orthodox Christian be forced to shave his beard? Would a Latin be forced to remove his scapular? Would a Baptist be forced to remove his WWJD t-shirt?

I do not agree with Mohammedans, nor with Jews, nor with Latins or Baptists—but surely they deserve the same liberty I desire. This is a nation founded, however imperfectly, upon principles of freedom; that is our principle strength. We allow our fellow men to endanger their very souls in the name of freedom (what else is religious toleration but allowing another to go to Hell?); surely we can afford to allow them to wear head-coverings.

You’re the President of the United States of America, and you’ve just been informed that an asteroid may or may not hit the Earth. What do you do?

Christopher Browne has an excellent article on spreadsheets, why they’re and why they’re bad, among many other excellent pieces. A fine site in general.

On the way back from Castle Rock this evening I was pulled over for the second time in my life—for supposedly failing to make a full stop at a stop sign. Fortunately, the fellow in question was nice enough to let me go without a ticket. It’s a good thing he wasn’t a mile up the road…

Tonight I got my calze properly fitted. Next I need to sew over the basted seams and put in eyelets at the proper spots, but I’m in the home stretch now! I’m wearing my mutande (underwear), calze (what some might term tights), camicia (shirt) and farsetto (doublet), and I look completely and utterly sharp. I cannot wait to get everything completed!

Yesterday my parish had a men’s retreat led by His Grace, Bishop Basil covering the works of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Very, very interesting review of Mount Athos, Athonite monasticism and more.

We men of the Schola Cantorum chanted Matins, the Liturgy, Sext and Vespers. Did a pretty good job, except where our pastor sprang surprises on us—we’re as yet unable to sight-sing new material. There’s something wonderful about the sound of men’s voices chanting to God, an effect quite ruined by even a single woman’s voice. It’s strange how those same tones which delight one so in ordinary speech repel one in church. It’s been pointed out to me that there is a similar effect with women’s voices vs. a single man’s voice. Apparently men sound good and women sound good, but not together. There is probably some sort of lesson there…

Last night I dropped by my folks’ house in order for my mother to fit my calze to me; while there, I played about with the cable TV music channels. For those who don’t have ’em, these are simply channels which play songs and display title, artist, album & some random trivia. No videos, no DJ, no ads: just music. Very, very, very cool—the one reason I might consider getting cable or Dish Network or something similar.

I discovered that my mother enjoys the song Rebel Yell by Billy Idol. Disturbing, that. I also discovered that a majority of the songs I enjoy come from before my youngest brother’s birth. Yet more disturbing, that.

The premium gas today was selling for the princely sum of $1.999 per gallon. I had to pay $1.919 per, myself. If this war was about oil, as all the idiot leftists seem to think, then why the hell am I facing the prospect of paying $2/gal. this summer? Sheesh, I remember when it was less than a dollar. Those were the days.

Cars now no longer come with proper cigarette lighters and ashtrays; instead one must pay extra for the so-called smokers’s package. Now, I don’t smoke in my car, but I want ashtrays and a lighter. I devoutly hope that some namby-pamby pansy fairy-twit limp-wrist anti-smoker freezes to death in the mountains because his car got stranded and he was unable to start a fire with the cigarette lighter he would have had, had he been a man.

Several Congressmen, including fellow Coloradan Hefley, believe that Congress should be able to overturn the Supreme Court by a simple two-thirds vote. Utter lunacy. The Founders were wise to provide a mechanism by which the Constitution can be amended; this would short-circuit that entire process such that the Congress could effectively rewrite the Constitution at will.

Steven Weinberg argues cogently against manned space exploration, noting quite rightly that all the benefits of space have come (or could have come) through unmanned missions. For the cost of the current Hubble and its repair missions, we could have sent up seven in unmanned launches. Sending men to Mars is a thousand times more expensive that sending robots—and there’s no value to it. Why?

Today several of us had lunch with a gal we used to work with who is moving to Chicago in a few days. She’d not seen me in several months, and upon doing so exclaimed, you’ve lost so much weight! In addition to being one of those phrases a gal can say to a guy but no guy can ever say to a gal, it has the virtue of being true. Life is good.

Well, except for the spirit-crushing loneliness. Other than that, it’s going well.

Well, I just finished re-reading the Chronicles of Prydain, and they brought to mind several things: the girl who gave them to me; a fall in which the dreariest of days was full of sunshine; a winter which was gloriously golden summer. I rather hoped she might be my Eilonwy and I her Taran. And then came that black day just over four years ago (27 Feb. ’00) when all those hopes came crashing down about me, and my striving came to naught and that was, as it’s said, that.

My doublet, it is finished. After hours upon hours of labour (there are 40 eyelets, each of which took 15–30 minutes to complete, and the collar lining took several hours itself, and then there’s the rest of the construction), I have sewn a 15th century Italian farsetto. Interestingly, now that it is done I cannot even recall how long it took (although I should note that at my current bill rate the eyelets alone would have cost $1,000–$2,000).

I should also note that I am incredibly sexy in my camicia (shirt) & farsetto. I may need to hire a police guard in order to protect myself from the hordes of women certain to throw themselves at me. It’s that good. Now, to work on my calze…

These are the fundamentals of bachelor cooking:

1. A properly balanced meal consists of meat, beer and one or fewer vegetable ingredients. The permitted vegetables are: instant mashed potato or frozen peas.
2. Taking any active part in food preparation is called cooking. This may include choosing the pizza toppings, phoning the order to the curry house and putting the frozen lasagne into the microwave.
3. Salad is for rabbits.
4. The complete list of allowable BBQ foods is:
   • Beer
   • Hamburgers
   • Sausages
   • Steak
   • Ketchup
   • Bread
   But not too much bread.
5. Food does not age when put in the fridge. In future, people seeking the secret of eternal life will spend years in their fridges, wrapped in cling-film.
6. It stands to reason that if a food is full of preservatives, then the consumer who eats it will also age slower, and remain healthier for longer.
7. The Bachelor should always be ready to entertain unexpected guests. In the fridge keep plenty of beer.
8. The correct place for dirty pots, pans and plates is in artistic and precarious piles in the sink, on tables, benches and chairs, on top of the T.V, on the floor or in the garden. In each pile the smallest item should always form the base.
9. The correct time to wash dirty plates is right before you next want to use them.
10. Evil things from months ago lurk in the back of food cupboards and fridges. Never explore the dark reaches beyond the warm, comforting light that plays on the (relatively) recently bought items in the front. Whatever is going on in the back should be left alone.
11. No potato is ripe until it has developed leaves and a root system of its own.
12. Rice never goes off.
13. Beer should never get the chance.
14. Everything tastes better fried.
15. Food dropped on the floor is best cleaned by holding it carefully and blowing on it. This works regardless of what was on the boots you wore in the kitchen yesterday, where your dog went last night and whether or not you ever turned on a vacuum cleaner.
16. Dessert is for wimps.
17. The ultimate aim of cooking is to use only one pot in the process. For maximum points, that pot should be a frying pan.
18. The correct procedure to follow whenever anything goes wrong is to order pizza. The list of possible things going wrong includes failure to buy food, tiredness, rain, visitors, or a lack of visitors. It is amazing how much can go wrong.
19. Cleaning the cooking scraps out of the pot you last used last week ruins the flavour of the meal you try to cook in the same pot tonight. Better to just use it anyway.
20. Cooking the food is easy. Eating it afterwards is the hard part.

Found at http://www.btinternet.com/~knutty.knights/more_bach_cook.html.

I recently discovered that Vitamin Cottage doesn’t just sell vitamins and dietary supplements, but also organic, healthy and vegetarian groceries. I’ve been in this condo for nearly a year with a grocer’s within walking distance and never knew this! Maybe I can actually do the whole market fresh food thing sometime.

Lucy Gaston was an early anti-smoking activist described as looking like Abraham Lincoln without the beard (I’d add that she also possessed approximately the same moral sense as that tyrant) whose efforts eleven states banned smoking. Amusingly and fittingly, she died of throat cancer despite never having smoked: her foolishness didn’t save her.

One can only hope that a similar fate would befall all anti-smokers. Although to tell the truth, I’m not picky about their manner of leaving: they can fall from great heights, or get food poisoning, or forget to breathe (not unlikely among such unintelligent types), so long as they stop spewing their venom. It’d be even more pleasing were they to repent, becoming pleasant neighbours and useful members of society—but that’s not very likely as the great mass of them are fanatics.

Islamist Bahrainis attacked a restaurant and its patrons for serving alcohol, going so far as to throw Molotov cocktails at cars and storming the restaurant bearing knives. One brave diner wrested a knife from one of the hoods and severely injured him.

This is the result of allowing a religion to dictate state policy. The only difference between these idiot Islamists and an American prohibitionist is their religion of choice. Religion has a definite place in the public sphere, but it has no place in lawmaking. We should all be free to pursue our beliefs, so long as we do not impose on others who do not share them. These thugs wish to impose their religion on others, and we rightly decry them. Who will be logically consistent and decry those thugs in our very own country who wish to imprison and fine those who work on Sundays, or who consume alcohol, or whose behaviour is sinful?

Rich Lowry rebuts Al Franken’s criticisms, once again proving that to be a leftist one must necessarily be ignorant or dishonest. That is, either one has no real knowledge of the subject at hand, or one ignores the knowledge one has.

John Derbyshire argues that we should eliminate Congress, since it hasn’t really done anything useful in years. He also has an amusing account of becoming an American.

Project Gutenberg is an invaluable resource containing thousands of free electronic books dating back to 1971. The books are stored in plain ASCII and can thus be easily viewed and reformatted; I got much of my Classic Literature from it.

Apparently George Washington spent 7% of his salary on drink; amusingly enough, since he’s one of my ancestors (kinda: he had no children but adopted one of my forefathers, I budget just shy of that amount from my own income. I should note that’s after taxes, savings &c.: last year I spent 3½% of my actual income on the stuff: less than taxes, rent, mortgage interest or food.

My Doublet is nearly done now: it’s completely assembled and tonight I finished half of the eyelets which lace up the front. Another dozen and I’ll be done with it, and then on to the chausses.

When I replaced the faulty drive yesterday, I discovered that I had screwed up my IDE configuration: both mirrors were on the same IDE bus, one master & one slave. This meant that it was almost always saturated. I fixed it, and now everything is fast, blazing fast.

For those who don'’t know, an IDE bus can handle one or two drives. If two, the one at the end of the bus must be configured as the master and the one in the middle as the slave. Nowadays many drives have a Cable Select option which is supposed to negotiate the master-slave relationship, but that's untrustworthy. If you’re mirroring two drives, make sure that they are on separate buses. Also, the master typically gets better performance than the slave—make rarely-used drives like CD drives the slaves if possible.

Yesterday one of my hard drives failed. Fortunately, it’s mirrored, and I so today after work I replaced it. Very straightforward operation. Linux is cool.

Foresters accidentally cut down the 500-year-old oak tree, symbol of its village and attraction for artists from around the world. Truly, truly sad. The tree survived the Thirty-Years’ War; it survived world wars; but it couldn’t survive a bunch of bumbling buffoons. I’d wager good money that they were Gastarbeiten…

In New South Wales, Australia, it is illegal to carry a knife in a public place or school, except under certain restricted circumstances (it’s necessary to one’s job; one is preparing food &c.)—and it is not considered a reasonable excuse to possess a knife for self-defence. This is where we are headed, people: the handgun prohibitionists dearly want to move onto all firearms, then all edged weapons, and finally all weapons, period. They are, quite simply, insane.

It’s sad to think that a fellow member of the Anglosphere is as degraded as Australia. Perhaps there will come a day that she will come to her senses. Doubtful, though.

My dear brother informs me the girls’ lacrosse is an entirely different game from the real thing—apparently it bears approximately the same resemblance to actual lacrosse that field hockey bears to the genuine article. In that case, I rescind my comments on the matter. Mens sana in corpore sano, after all: it’s no less true for gals than for guys.

I drove by a middle school recently and saw that its sporting fields were full of little girls playing lacrosse. What could their parents have been thinking? The sport is a nasty, vicious mass of fighting and swearing. I’ve seen professional lacrosse games—they’re as violent as hockey, or moreso. Had I children, I wouldn’t care to have my sons, much less my daughters, play it.

Found a wonderful website today which searching for resources on how to properly lace up garments: AmIPeriodOrNot.com. Based on an idea similar to amihotornot.com and many, many imitators, it’s a way for folks to evaluate how historical one’s clothing is. Pretty cool.

Sorry for the paucity of new entries—I’m sewing a doublet (kind of a cross between a shirt, a vest and a jacket) and hence haven’t much time to write anything. And of course I just realised that I have one of the fronts and one of the backs mis-sewn, so I’ve to unstitch them both and redo them. Sigh.

Pia de Solenni writes that 40% of women under the age of 45 have committed infanticide, that 25% of pregnancies are aborted and that since national legalisation 40 million have been slain. Forty percent—that means that the odds are roughly even that any particular woman has had an abortion. It boggles the mind. To be honest, I have difficulty believing that figure. Can it be that high?

Sandra Tsing Loh has lost her job for accidentally saying f—— on the air. What a bunch of nonsense. Who cares if a commentator curses? For millennia somehow mankind has somehow managed to deal with swearing, but now we have to protect the chiiildren from ever hearing a bad word. Lunacy.

At the end of the film Top Gun, there’s a great bit where Val Kilmer says, You can be my wingman any time, and Tom Cruise replies, Bullshit—you can be mine. The TV censors edited that to Nonsense—you can be mine, in a squeaky little voice-over. It ruins the scene. Morons.

Use properly, swearing is a useful conversational technique. It can highlight emotion and indicate points of interest. And in a supposedly free country, what is truly obscene is that anyone should be afraid of losing a radio license for airing a curse word.

I saw a .sig line today:

A village in Texas has lost it’s [sic] idiot.

Look to the plank in thine own eye before pointing out the mote in thy brother’s…

I received an email from Lois McMaster Bujold, authoress of the amazingly great Vorkosigan Saga, a series of ripping yarns set in outer space. I’d sent her webmaster one regarding how I got interested in her work through the Baen’s Free Library—The Mountains of Mourning is available as a free download, in HTML, Palm & other formats.

She’s one of my favourite authors, and now I have received an actual note from her. My cup runneth over and all that.

Tonight I finished my Italian Renascence shirt. It is so cool. Three-and-a-half yds. of linen gave their lives to make it—it’s nearly roomy enough to fit another in it. I did make one slight mistake: the left cuff had no seam allowance, and so it is a bit snugger than is perhaps strictly necessary, but that just keeps me humble. Maybe if I get a couple of hours to kill I’ll take it off and add another. As it is, it’s an absolutely beautiful piece of work. Perhaps I’ll get around to putting pictures of it up (shortly after I get access to a digital camera). The eighteen or so hours necessary to finish it have paid off well.

Now, to work on the doublet & chausses to accompany it…

Today I went out and purchased the materials for an Italian Renascence shirt (15th century). It should look pretty sharp, and I can also wear it underneath my Elizabethan doublet, should I ever get that piece finished (or even started!).

Man, I’ve watched a lot of films since getting a Netflix subscription: in two and a third years, I’ve seen 677 movies—over 5½ a week! For most of that time, I’ve been on the 8-at-a-time plan, and thus have paid a bit less than $1,200, averaging $1.76 per movie. It’s amazingly cheap.

CNN have an article on the theory that those with more noble blood tend to win presidential elections more frequently than those who do not. It makes sense: blood will tell, after all. Who better to conduct affairs of state than one who ancestors were bred for it? Of course, CNN are only reporting this because purportedly Kerry has more than Bush. The article is a puff piece, unfortunately, lacking a family tree. And it’s a bit silly: much is made of the fact that Kerry is (probably) descended from James I, and that Bush is descended from Charles II: the one is the grandson of the other!

How heavy was a mediæval sword? Those who’ve watched too many movies or read too much silly fiction might answer twenty pounds, or a dozen, or eight. The truth is most weighed less than three pounds.

Imagine if rather than Tolkien, it had been Douglas Adam, or Jane Austen, or Shakespeare who had written the Lord of Rings. An hilarious site.

Whilst downloading the newest crossfire client from Sourceforge, I saw an ad which interested me. Not wishing to disrupt what I was doing (and also aware that many ads pop open new windows when followed), I middle-clicked to open a new tab. When I got a moment, I eagerly turned to the tab to see what the ad was selling, only to find that the morons had, instead of using nice standard HTML links, done something-or-other which doesn’t play well with others, and so their link never loaded. They had to go above-and-beyond to break things; the easy way is also the correct way. Don’t they want to sell their product?

Robert Moran doesn’t think so. Bill Clinton re-elected with the exact same rates, and twenty years ago the current rate was considered the lowest possible.

There’s recently been several stories about certain memos written by Democratic senatorial staffers which Republican staffers read. The Dems claim that this required some act of cracking their computer systems to read. As Ira Winkler, a Democrat, demonstrates, this is not the case at all: the Democrats left the files wide open, even after being informed of the problem. A reasonable browser would conclude after the warning that any files remaining unsecured were public.

A 14 yr. old apprehended a burglar with a sword. The weapon was part of his brother’s collection—said brother having gone off to war, telling him to protect his mother and sister. I tell you, it’s as though it were in a book. This kid can dine out on the story for the rest of his life. Lucky fellow.

I placed an order with Arms & Armour today for the first of many pieces: the High Gothic Mace (I had called on Saturday, but I guess the smith was out). A mere eight weeks from now and it will be mine!

My next purchase, later this year, will be the German Flail, which is an absolutely beautiful item; next year I plan to purchase the German Rapier. I’m not certain what I’ll get the next year: possibly the German Branch Sword or Italian Stiletto, or perhaps a parrying dagger. No matter what it is, it shall no doubt be magnificent.

In my monthly Target Visa bill I received a number of coupons: one for a Playtex bra; one for a Hanes Her Way Pure Bliss bra (women’s clothing has odd names); and one for L'eggs Body Beautiful No Hose (ditto the last comment—and despite the name, I believe that the No Hose are in fact hose after all). I suppose some computer somewhere must believe me interested in such things. Which is not altogether untrue, but I’m certainly not interested in buying them; my attention is normally drawn by the one buying.

I thought marketing was supposed to be targeted these days. One would doubly expect it from a company named Target.

A group of Tolkien fans have produced a superlative Encycolpædia of Arda. Check it out—it’s good. Imperfect, but good.

Apparently The Lord of the Rings won every single award for which it was nominated. Despite my well-known concerns and grave with the adaptation, it will be an eternal monument as an incredibly well-realised visual rendition of a magnificent opus. Jackson captured the look of Middle Earth as none of us dared hope he would. From henceforth and forevermore I will read the books with his landscapes, his Riders, his buildings, his towers and many of his characters (not all, but many). My concerns are with his script, with his take, with his emphasis: never with the way he painted Tolkien’s great work onto the silver screen.

The mere making of the films demands recognition: for the first time in history, a trilogy has been filmed all at once, rather than piecemeal. The attention paid to atmosphere and detail was incredible: I recall a tale that the set for the Chamber of Mazarbul had shreds of parchment written with the Cirth Daeron scattered about itself—and that those shreds meant something. No camera ever focused on them; the effort of their preparation could be said to have been wasted—but they lent atmosphere to the actors, atmosphere that enabled them to better play their parts.

Jackson’s work was imperfect, but it far exceeded anything anyone might reasonably have hoped for. He surpassed what might have been expected, and has earned the right to hold his head high amongst our cinematic greats. To be brutally honest, I do not believe that he will ever reach or surpass the mark thus set—but that mark is graven in a fiery line which shall burn for decades to come.

I only hope that I live until the next interpretation of Tolkien’s works, the interpretation that weds visual excellence with narrative perfection to produce the film equivalent of Tolkien’s corpus.

I’ve read a very great deal about Gibson’s Passion from very perspectives. It occurred to me in church yesterday what the fundamental problem with it is: it is not Christ’s suffering and death which save us, but His Resurrection. That is why, even in the West, we Christians celebrate Easter, Pascha, the Feast of the Resurrection, not a theoretical feast of the crucifixion.

I then realised a problem with the Western theory of salvation-through-passion (albeit not the fundamental problem): it focuses on what was done to Christ, not on what Christ did. It’s a passive, feminine account of Salvation. It discounts Christ’s actions. He suffered, yes; He died, yes—and then He descended into Hell and harrowed it, freeing those who were bound there: trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life, as the hymn puts it. It is not by passivity but by action that Christ saved us.

I think that it’s also related to the Western love of inflexion points. Just as in the West there has to be an instant at which the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, so too there must be a single instant at which salvation is achieved. But that’s just not the way it is. The entire Liturgy is the process of changing the gifts into the Eucharist—and so to Christ’s entire life is part of the process of salvation. His incarnation as a man; His birth; His growing-up; His ministry; His suffering; His death; His resurrection; His ascension—all these are important. It’s not any one thing: it’s that God eternal became man and was born like we were, died like we do and rose like we will.

This obsession with one particular point in salvific history is unhealthy. It’s something like interpreting all of American history through the prism of 18th century settlements in Tennessee.

In an item brought to my attention by my dear brother, it seems that the California Supreme Court has ruled that Catholic Charities are not, in fact, a religious organisation—and thus that it must fund contraceptives for its employees, despite the Catholic stance against birth control and contraception. I suppose that soon the court will rule that black is white, the sky an interesting vertiginous shade and trees legally sentient.

If Catholic Charities are not religious, then what is? The fuckwits—I used the term deliberately: these are judges who brains have been severely fucked with, if they could come up with such specious reasoning—note that most folks served by the charity are not Catholic. What possible bearing does that have on anything? All that matters is that the organisation has a religious aversion to funding such coverage.

For that matter, how can any state justify requiring an employer to cover prescription contraceptives? Maybe that employer disagrees with them. Maybe that employer just doesn’t wish to pay for them. If his employees don’t like it, they can get another job—or simply stop screwing. One has no right to expect consequence-free happiness. With drink comes the risk of a hangover; with shooting, of an accident; with driving, of a crash; with sex, of producing children.

I don’t particularly agree with the Roman Church’s views on contraception (I think that it’s less ideal than it could be, but that it is not evil in and of itself), but that doesn’t change the fact that members of that church should be free to act according to their consciences.

I just finished watching Uncle Buck, just one of the many masterpieces in the Hughes œuvre. It’s amazing how astoundingly good so many of his films were: classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Vacation; weird Science; Planes, Trains & Automobiles; She’s Having a Baby; The Great Outdoors—and then he just dried up. Still, his numerous great films far outweigh the duds of his later years.

I entered the Ben Affleck/Sandra Bullock vehicle Forces of Nature with low expectations. Actually, it’s not at all bad. Despite what one might infer from the trailer, he actually does the right thing and sticks by his girl despite the not-insignificant attractions of Miss Bullock. It’s quite startling to see a movie advocating proper behaviour.

I saw Little Women on Saturday and, to be frank, I just wasn’t impressed. We’re supposed to pity this supposedly impoverished family—yet they’ve a fine, big house and can afford a servant. I hadn’t realised that mansions and maids are but one step away from utter destitution.

I have just had an excellent wine: Velletri, from Italy. Vinted in 1994 (yup, folks: it’ a decade old), it is wonderful. I can best describe the aroma as like unto honeycomb, with that spicy sweetness common to the best honeys (and wines—this is no coincidence). Amazing stuff. It makes me wish that I’d picked up more when it was available.

Unfortunately, the supply of pre-twenty-first-century wines is steadily diminishing. Someday my (thus far theoretical and improbable) children will find a bottle of 19xx just as strange and exotic as I would a bottle of 18xx.

I just finished watching L’ Anglaise et le duc (The Lady & the Duke) by Eric Rohmer (a Frenchman, by law at least—with a name like that he’s no Gaul), a film about an Englishwoman in revolutionary France. It occurred to me whilst watching it that among the greatest of sins must be regicide: it is simultaneously an offence against a man (the king whom who has slain); against the State (for without a king there can be no State) and against God (who has, as St. Paul writes, placed over us our rulers). I do not think that any punishment is sufficient for those who commit the sin of regicide.

Interesting, too, how those who would strive against the Divine Order always seem to sink into worse. The revolutionary French ended up with the Reign of Terror, with the deaths of women and children; the revolutionary Russians slew women, children, priests & monks indiscriminately; the revolutionary Germans ended up with the Nazi reign of terror and genocide and the aforementioned atrocities; the revolutionary Chinese ended up with cannibalism and all the rest. Is it any wonder that revolutionaries are revolting?

For months now I’ve been arguing that we should not create gay marriage, but rather eliminate civil marriage entirely. Larry Elder agrees with me. As he writes, leave marriage to non-governmental institutions, like churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship or private institutions.