Jason’s Dad’s casemodded recliner
September 24, 2008
Posted in Computer stuff 
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Senator Barack Obama meets President Jed Bartlet
September 22, 2008
OBAMA
I appreciate your sense of humor, sir, but I really could use your advice.
BARTLET
Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.
OBAMA
Which was?
BARTLET
A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.
OBAMA
And?
BARTLET
I was.
OBAMA
I mean, how did you overcome that?
BARTLET
I won’t lie to you, being fictional was a big advantage.
OBAMA
What do you mean?
BARTLET
I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.
OBAMA
I’m asleep?
BARTLET
Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.
OBAMA
Yes, sir.
BARTLET
I mean tons.
OBAMA
I understand.
BARTLET
I didn’t even think there were that many white women.
OBAMA
I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?
BARTLET
I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.
OBAMA
How did you do it?
BARTLET
Well, I say I’m sorry a lot.
OBAMA
I don’t mean your marriage, sir....
…But the meat’s in the bottom of the “interview.” Go read.
Posted in Film and TV, Politics 2 Comments »
Ignoring the Lipstick Wars for the moment…
September 11, 2008
(sigh) It’s hard to ignore the political noise right now, but as it gets noisier and each side spins the other one (or itself) as hard as it can, I prefer to go back to the earliest available sources to start understanding candidates’ behavior with an eye to projecting how they might possibly behave in the future. I find newspaper citations, especially local ones, can be a useful resource.
With this in mind: this document (a Democrat-prepared opposition document) found at Politico.com contains numerous excerpted details from local Alaskan newspapers regarding various aspects of Sarah Palin’s early political life. Leaving the source aside, and ignoring the bullet points on the first page, this doc is useful in that it gathers a lot of cites together. Does it have its own bias? Doubtless. However, it’s still interesting preliminary reading.
(ETA: This brought me up short —
Asked if she was offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, Palin responded, “Not on your life. If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.”
Did she seriously not know that that phrase was only added in 1956? “What do they teach them in these schools…?”)
Posted in Politics 5 Comments »
In the As Political as I’m Going to Get Dep’t
September 9, 2008
(If you can’t see the YouTube video embedded below, go here.)
(courtesy of Mark Evanier’s news from me)
Posted in Current events, Fantasy and science fiction, Humor, Media, Politics No Comments »
JKR vs. RDR: decision’s in: Rowling wins
September 8, 2008
Finally…
After four months of deliberating, Judge Robert Patterson has ruled that the H.P. Lexicon infringes J.K. Rowling’s copyright in the Harry Potter series.
The decision proper is here (.PDF file).
Briefly: yay.
Posted in Current events, Fantasy and science fiction, News No Comments »
(mutter) Hardware Follies: my desktop machine’s graphics card is unwell
September 7, 2008
Very unwell. And apparently getting more so. I’m starting to work my way through all the usual stages to make sure of where the problem is — replacing the monitor driver, installing new display drivers for the card (it’s a Radeon 9800), running diagnostics — but at the moment, here’s what I’ve got.
…Not much to say but frak. And this is the worst possible timing for this, as the household budget is not going to allow me to do anything about this for days and days yet.
…If I have any fans at Radeon who feel inclined to send me some old 9800 that’s lying around (it would be something of a legacy card these days), this would be the moment.
…Gaaaaaaaaah.
Posted in Administrivia, Computer stuff, Home life 1 Comment »
On SciFi (UK) this weekend: Sword of Xanten aka Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King
September 5, 2008
For those of you on the European side of the water who haven’t seen it as yet: SciFi UK is showing Sword of Xanten (this being the goofy name that Channel 4 in the UK, like a terminally confused fairy godmother, wished on The Ring / Die Nibelungen / Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King) this Sunday and Monday.
Kristanna Loken is absolutely worth watching in this as Queen Brunnhild. And there is, of course, the story: a somewhat-reworked but not too damaged version of the great German epic poem the Nibelungenlied. (The trouble with the Ring mythos is picking and choosing which bits you’re going to keep and which you’re not. Our producers chose to avoid the Wagnerian additions to the story, hewing closer to the storyline as set out in the poem., though we also drew on the Eddaic sources for some pieces of business.)
We had fun writing this. If you have time, pop a beverage and sit back and watch Brunnhild whale on Siegfried with that spear. (And chuck poor King Gunter out of bed before the real trouble starts.) Watch the dragon engage in mortal battle with Bennu Fürmann’s wig. (Those wigs never worked on the poor man.) And watch South Africa look really amazingly like the Rhine valley…
Posted in Fantasy and science fiction, Film and TV, Media No Comments »
In the Now How About That Dep’t: The bonding gene
September 2, 2008
Just reading this article gives me entirely too many ideas for SF stories having to do with scary possible gene therapies…
“Our main finding was an association between a variant of the vasopressin receptor 1a gene and how strong bonds men reported they had to their partners,” said lead researcher Hasse Walum, of the department of medical epidemiology and biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “Men carrying this variant scored on average lower on a scale measuring the strength of the bond compared to men not carrying this variant.”
Women married to men carrying the “poorer bonding” form of the gene also reported “lower scores on levels of marital quality than women married to men not carrying this variant,” Walum noted.
…Vasopressin activates the brain’s reward system, and “you could say that mating-induced vasopressin release motivates male voles to interact with females they have mated with,” Walum said. “This is not a sexual motivation, but rather a sort of prolonged social motivation.” In other words, the more vasopressin in the brain, the more male voles want to stick around and mingle with the female after copulation is through. This effect “is more pronounced in the monogamous voles,” Walum noted.
NB: this study was done on voles. If you’re human, your mileage might vary.
And this final note:
…it’s too early for men to blame their inability to commit on a single gene, although Lucas guesses it’s an excuse that’s “certainly going to be used.”
Posted in Science No Comments »
tl; dr
August 31, 2008
My nominee for this year’s Too Long: Don’t Read award…
This autumn, according to the newspaper Libération, 676 new books will be published [in France], 466 of them written in French, the rest long-awaited translations. According to François Reynaert in Le Nouvel Observateur, “The name alone is leaden - in the expression ‘rentrée littéraire,’ one hears especially ‘rentrée.’ It smells of the back of the classroom and the old eraser.”
One novel, “Zone,” by Mathias Enard, consists of one sentence running over 500 pages.
Pass.
Posted in Europe 1 Comment »
I love “Polite Dissent”
August 28, 2008
…for rigorous medicine applied to that often non-medically-rigorous venue, the comics. The most recent example, quoted at length (and there’s more at source — I trimmed it a little):
Dr. Koslowski (narrating): Dr. Singh decided to inject 5ccs of Adrenalin directly into the Joker’s heart. It was our only chance to save thousands of lives.
Injecting medication directly into the heart, despite what you may have seen in Pulp Fiction, is not a good idea. It’s too easy to lacerate a coronary artery (causing a massive heart attack) or inject the medication into the heart muscle (causing a fatal arrhythmia). It’s not done anymore….
Dr. Koslowski: At which point the Joker flatlined.
So what does the medical team do? They defibrillate him.
Once again repeat after me: Do not shock a flatline. It is a bad idea. It may work in comic book (like it does here), but in real life it doesn’t work and may actually make the situation worse…Once again, the Joker suffers a cardiac arrest . This time, Batman himself jabs the Joker in the heart with a syringe full of Adrenalin. The second time’s a charm and it works! The Joker returns to consciousness and promptly escapes…which was all part of Batman’s plan; he wanted to trick the Joker into leading him to the third bomb.
…Let’s count the medical errors in a mere eight pages: the Joker flatlines and is subsequently defibrillated, not to mention injected twice directly in the heart with an overdose of Adrenalin.
Note to self: Do not seek emergency medical care in Gotham City. Hold it until you reach Metropolis.
Heh heh. Go Scott!
Posted in Comics, Medicine, nursing, health, Online life No Comments »
The joys of Metaquotes
August 28, 2008
Today’s delights from LJ’s Metaquotes community:
Deep Ones! Meet the Deep Ones! / They’re a rugose, squamous familyyyyy…
“…OH CHRIST WHO LET JOKER HAVE PENCILS!?”
…In these days “batshit” literally meant the shit of bats, and flame wars were conducted via snail mail or newspaper editorials.
And:
Trek and Stargate: kindred under the skin
Posted in Humor, Online life No Comments »
In the Can’t Breathe For Laughing / Running Dep’t.
August 28, 2008
Two World of Warcraft players use treadmills to run around Azeroth: almost suffer heart attack
(Thanks to Christy Marx for this.)
Posted in Computer stuff, Online life No Comments »
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