Octopodial Chrome

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian; he never smoked; he was a teetotaller; he shaved his beard. Any questions?

A survivor of the 1966 University of Texas shooting reminisces:

As I walked down the hall toward that office the sound of a large caliber rifle thundered from that open doorway followed by two men talking. After all the bizarre events of the last few minutes it didn’t seem strange to me when I peeked around the office doorway to see one professor shooting a deer rifle at the top of tower while the other fed him ammunition. It never entered my mind to question why an English professor would have his deer rifle in his office complete with boxes of ammunition. This was Texas after all. Guns were commonplace. From the office windows, we could see the top of the tower clearly. Small puffs of smoke were coming from the rifle of the sniper on the observation deck. The large glass faced clock above the observation deck was shattered from others shooting back at him. The professor ran through several boxes of shells before running out of rounds. My ears were ringing.

That’s as it should be.

I missed this last Veteran’s Day: Bæn books is offering a free pass to all cripples, as well as the blind, paralysed, dyslexic and those with amputated limbs. Many of the books available at webscription.net are top-notch; I can especially recommend David Weber & Lois McMaster Bujold.

This is a fine gesture towards disabled military veterans as well as those who are congenitally disabled; Bæn should be lauded.

I thought I had it bad, working 80 hour weeks trying to get hosts patched in time for the DST change. Well, someone had it worse: Cody Webb was arrested and incarcerated for 12 days for a bomb threat he didn’t make. He had called the student hotline an hour before the threat came in, but the Caller ID system didn’t switch over properly.

There’s a priceless quote from his principal when he was trying to defend himself, Well, why should we believe you? You’re a criminal. Criminals lie all the time. Way to beg the question, idiot.

This man has stuck his Glock .45 ACP in mud, in sand, in baby powder. He’s shot at it; he’s run it over with trucks; he’s dragged it behind a car. He’s dropped it from a roof and tossed it from a plane. He’s never cleaned it in 10 years. And it shoots as good as the day he got it.

I hate the way Glocks look, but if my life ever depended on a firearm, a Glock is what I’d want to shoot.

A contronym is a word which means its own opposite. An example is clip: it means both to fasten & to attach. Very cool.

…in one fell swoop.

Henry Blodget details how federal tax policy hurts saving and encourages spending. Basically, if you save money you end up paying more in taxes than you make in real terms, primarily because of inflation: taxes are based on nominal gains, not real gains—if you invest $100 and have $103.60 at the end of the year, that’s actually $100.60 in constant dollars, but you pay $1.20 for the nominal gain and end up with $99.40. Given the option between spending $100 today and spending $96 in a decade, wouldn’t you go for $100 today? I know I would.

Peter Huber has a review of the past two centuries of disease prevention. Something I didn’t realise: the polio vaccine is infectious; one takes it and then proceeds to vaccinate one’s family as well as they catch the bug. He also indicates how our brief respite from infectious disease has misled us into complacency; we are vulnerable to infection once more, form antibiotic-resistant strains, from immunodeficiency viruses and more. And yet we go on fiddling…

An EMT posts on why you should wear a seatbelt. Very good read. The only thing I disagree with is his approval of seatbelt laws. Wearing a seatbelt is good for one’s body, certainly. Being an Orthodox Christian is good for one’s soul, too. I don’t support laws to enforce the latter; neither do I support laws to enforce the former.

A major portion of a car’s work is pushing air out of its way—that’s a huge transfer of energy to create wind which just dissipates. Why not use that energy to generate electricity? Mark Oberholzer has proposed a scheme of wind turbines installed in Jersey barriers installed in highway medians; he estimates that such a project could provide enough energy to power a light rail system.

Continuing my tradition of posting monthly mixes from epinion’s DrFaustus, here’s the April mix:

1. The Merrymakers: April’s Fool
2. XTC: Then She Appeared
3. Beck: Tropicalis
4. Pizzicato 5: Baby Love Child
5. The Apples in Stereo: The Rainbow
6. Chris Isaak: Somebody’s Crying
7. Shivaree: Goodnight Moon
8. The Kinks: Village Green Preservation Society
9. The La’s: There She Goes
10. Jill Sobule: Rainy Day Parade
11. Thunderclap Newman: Something in the Air
12. Rufus Wainwright: April Fools

Yet again, a fine mix for a fine month.

The New York Times have a top-notch tool to help you decide whether it’s better to rent or buy your home. You simply input such values as rent, home value, down payment, mortgage rate, tax rate and estimate annual home appreciation & rent increase, and it tells you how long it would take for you to be ahead of the game by buying—if you ever would be.

For me, it works out to eight years. I’m halfway there! On the other hand, I input some guesses for other folks I know, and in some cases it was better for them to rent.

Before you buy you should check it out.

Dallas has decided to start issuing fines to policemen & firemen caught on camera running red lights illegally. The policemen are up in arms over this, as apparently they believe that running red lights is a perquisite of the job.

Firemen, on the other hand, accept that the rules apply to them just as much as any citizen.

A policeman beat and abused a decorated veteran of the First Gulf War. The veteran’s crime? He had a van with expired plates in his front driveway. The policeman’s response? To pepper-spray him, then strike him repeatedly with his baton, causing a hospitalisation and episodes of blindness. Oh yes, and to scream You f****** Arab! You f***** immigrant, go back to you f****** country before I kill you! The man he was beating was not, as it happens, an Arab—but rather, a Sikh.

The thug is not named in the article; he should be.

Times restaurant reviewer Giles Coren lived and ate like an Edwardian gentleman for a week, dining on oysters, roasts, champagne, tongue, bacon, eggs and all the rest. The diet is supposed to be horrible for one, but man does it sound tasty.

Well, today I finally surrendered: I have purchased a cell phone and a minimal plan. I’m replacing a VoIP phone which has been less than useless, and plan to replace my pager if this works out. I decided that I’d much rather have the option of working from a coffeehouse a day or two a week rather than being cooped up at home. Although the phone’s only for work, I fear that it might become my master, as seems to be the nature of the accursed things.

I really don’t want people to call me. But given that they will, I’d rather they reach me sitting at a charming table in a pleasant cafe, flirting with a pretty waitress, watching the world pass by & drinking a bitter espresso—yes, I’d far rather they reach me thus than sitting in my underwear, unkempt, unwashed, unshaven, having seen neither man nor woman for days. The former is far more preferable.

Here’s a map of American urban centres displaying gender disproportionality amongst singles. This, obviously, is why I’m still single: Denver has tens of thousands more men than women! Interestingly, the East has more single women and the West has more single men. I wonder why that is. Maybe men move from the East to the West more often than women do?

It turns out that 3.7–3.85 percent of fathers have been cuckolded. Over a million men are stuck caring for someone else’s child—and no-one seems to care. Many physicians and genetic counsellors will not tell you if it turns out that you’re unrelated to your children, even if they have sure evidence thereof.

I think it might be appropriate for a man to still be emotionally attached to children he’s raised, and he might wish to provide for them financially. But if he discovers that he is not their father, then he has every right to stop paying for them if that is his choice. No man should be forced to pay hundreds or thousands a month to support another man’s children.

Apparently sunspots are at a 1,000-year high. In the past a correlation between low sunspot activity and low temperatures (including the Little Ice Age). Over the last hundred years sunspots have been increasing; could this possibly be why the globe is warming? Nah, it couldn’t possibly be the massive fusion reactor in the sky.

The article does note that sunspot activity has been constant for the last twenty years, and that in 1,150 years it has never been as active as in the past sixty. Is it possible that sixty years ago activity increased, and now it’s at a peak, and over the past twenty years temperatures have been increasing to catch up? Maybe not—I’m no climatologist.

We’ve all seen & heard musicians performing in the street, at subway stations, in the park and in other public places. Maybe we’ve even heard a particularly good one. What if that musician were one of the finest in the world? What if he were playing a $3½ million Stradivarius? Would we stop and notice? The Washington Post put Joshua Bell into a DC subway station to see what would happen…

142 years ago General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, and the South’s hopes for freedom were dashed.

Any state has a right to secede; the Constitution does not forbid it, and thus that right is retained, under the terms of the Tenth Amendment. The southern states had every right to leave the Union, and the Union had no right to maintain armed forces on their territory, or to use force of arms to conquer them.

That said, the South was wrong to secede. Its secession (like those of 1776 & 1835) was inspired primarily by a fear that slavery would be abolished; chattel slavery as it was practised in the American South being itself wrong, actions taken to safeguard it are themselves wrong.

That being said, the Union had no business stopping the South from leaving. The appropriate response would have been, good-bye, and good riddance!. Instead, the Yankees killed nearly 600,000 men, raped women, destroyed private property and subjugated 9.1 million citizens for over a century. It was, quite simply, the single most unjust war in American history; it wasn’t until the 1980s that the South truly recovered.

And yet I’m glad that it ended as it did. Had America been split permanently in twain, I don’t believe we would ever have achieved the prominence and power we now have. The United States have been the greatest, freest nation on earth, and I’m proud to be a citizen thereof. My heart swells when I see the flag and hear the Star Spangled Banner. The war was a long time ago, and we’re all Americans now.

Here’s a simple idea: make Congressmen and Senators read the bills they vote for. That’s not asking for much, is it?

An idiot legislator wishes to make one register to buy baking soda. Why? Because it can be used to make crack.

I don’t do drugs; I don’t particularly want to do drugs. But can someone please tell me how this is a legitimate power of the State? Can someone please tell me how this enables life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness?

We didn’t put our feet down when the federal government unconstitutionally banned marijuana and cocaine. We didn’t put our feet down when cold medicine was made a controlled substance. We didn’t put our feet down when cold medicine was turned into a placebo. We didn’t put our feet down when paint became a controlled substance. We didn’t put our feet down when lye became a controlled substance. Will we finally stand up for our rights when baking soda is controlled?

I strongly doubt it.

Orlando police arrested a man for feeding the homeless. Orlando has a law against feeding more than 25 people at a time within 2 miles of City Hall without a permit (such permits are available but twice a year).

I’m a firm believer that the punishment should fit the crime. In this case, the Orlando city government and the police officers in question should have their stomachs stapled. How dare they arrest a man for feeding the hungry?

Apparently there are now 32 CCTV cameras within 200 yards of George Orwell’s London flat. The surveillance society which he envisioned—and which we spent fifty years fighting to prevent—has come to pass. And no-one cares; no-one stands up to oppose it.

Some thoughts.

Greek proverb

There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless—boys and women, and I am neither one.

William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Leonato: You may light on a husband that hath no beard.

Beatrice: What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting-gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him…

St. Clement of Alexandria

How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!

This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature…It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness.

It is not lawful to pluck out the beard, man’s natural and noble adornment.

St. Cyprian

In their manners, there was no discipline. In men, their beards were defaced.

The beard must not be plucked. You will not deface the figure of your beard.

The Apostolic Constitutions

Men may not destroy the hair of their beards and unnaturally change the form of a man. For the Law says, You will not deface your beards. For God the Creator has made this decent for women, but has determined that it is unsuitable for men.

Consider these carefully.