And then I should be done with stupid and lame tech geek jokes about the entry numbers. I hope.
except 1337 will be "leet"!
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Today, with the sun shining and all, they decided to have another power failure. It started mid-afternoon and ended about 7:45 PM. I somehow managed to sleep through most of it, probably because I was so damned tired from Saturday's lack-of-sleep-fest.
This happened hours after we had a thunderstorm around noonish, by the way.
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May 27th, we had the heater on because it was cold outside. Now it's barely the second week of June and I've had the AC on for three days straight.
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So, sum total of accomplishments for Sunday, June 8, 2008: zero. But I did catch up on my sleep. O yea.
*sigh*
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It looks like opera is the new medium of choice. Al Gore's alleged documentary
This is the kind of stuff that gives me a stabbing pain behind the eyes. Still, maybe I could get a job writing the libretto for some of this stuff:
I wish I knew how to quit youSorry, that got a bit disgusting, there, but at least I didn't go for a line about "poo".
I'm in love with your hot man goo
Let me rinse and lather your 'do
I should have been a hairdresser
And the other one?
The little people? I just laughAnd the worst part of it is, this shit is better than what'll actually be in the operas. Count on it.
They don't need hot water baths
Or cars or trucks or SUVs
Those things are Gaia's disease
They must quit their foolish ways
And live like folks in caveman days
Yes, when 30-odd was "old", and
You could die from a head cold
Humans are Earth's biggest crisis
The enviroment is what is priceless
Although I am not, and have never been, a poet (nor have ever played one on TV) I am the king of coming up with bad song lyrics. Probably because I just put my best effort into writing a poem.
For one story, set at a fictional tech college in the Pacific northwest, I needed to come up with several bad songs. Well, I managed, let me tell you:
...now just imagine it set to deathmetal music, and you've got it.Plastique Flowers
I grew up in the desert
Training for jihad
Then I met you, babe
I want you so bad
I live in a desert
Got nothing here for you
But I made some plastique flowers
They're an ugly shade of blue
Eh? Oh: train one monkey to hit an oil drum with a pipe wrench, moderately fast: BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. Then train another monkey to strum a guitar at about the same speed. Crank the distortion on the guitar. Then you stand in front of a microphone, put a distortion pedal (set on max) between the mike and the amp, and scream those lyrics into the mike as loud as you can.
In fact, you can probably get away with just yelling "BLAAALAAAA BLAAAAAA!" half the time, and no one will notice.
I wish I were exaggerating.
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This is a bit much. The headline says "Child porn OK'd for public exhibit", but I did a Google image search for "Bill Henson" and found examples of the guy's work.
It's not pornography, not of any stripe.
What I intensely dislike about the mores of our time is the idea that photographs of nudity automatically equals pornography. How ironic it is that post-sexual revolution society is more Victorian about nudity, rather than less.
It used to be that people could take pictures of nude models without arousing any suspicion. Nudes are a traditional subject for art. And it also used to be that parents could take pictures of "baby's first bath" without getting in trouble.
These days, though, any nudity--if photographed--is automatically sexual nudity, which is a no-no under certain circumstances. Particularly if the model is underage.
In the case of the linked article, though, the stuff is not pornography; it's art. People should learn the difference.
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This post by the Anchoress has demonstrated to me that my instincts with regards to the Colbert Report were dead on: a guy who is pretending to be a caricature of a conservative.
Colbert's schtick is that he's a conservative commentator a la Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh. And I am sure that he--to his audience--appears to be so. But he's not; and it's obvious to me that he's merely pretending to be conservative, like Archie Bunker or Derek Vinyard. (Both of whom, by the way, would find the other's politics agreeable.)
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It's a warm evening here in the Chicago area. (78° at 11:45 PM. Yeesh.) I went to McDonald's for dinner around 9:45 and it was summer, the way it is in July and August. It's a warm muggy one tonight. I was going to sit on the back patio and watch the heat lightning, but decided I preferred to sit at the computer and do this.
"Heat lightning" is one of the cool things about summer: free fireworks. You get to watch the interplay of charge in a thunderstorm without having to worry about getting wet or electrocuted, and as a bonus you can see the whole system rather than just the underside.
A thunderhead has a complex electrical system, and a chain of storm cells is even more complex as charge is generated and distributed and--eventually--nullified. It's all static electricity, powered by the sun, and it's marvelous to behold.
We still don't really understand the ebb and flow of electromagnetic energy in the Earth and its atmosphere. We know a lot about some things, but little about others.
The Earth has its own magnetic field and it exists within the sun's magnetic field. What effect does this have on Earth and its ecosystem? We only have limited ideas, but it seems to me that when you have one magnetic field moving in another, you're going to generate electricity...and that should result in some kind of warming, shouldn't it?
The sun and Earth are connected electromagnetically, not just by gravity, and it's possible that there are more sources of heating for Earth than just sunlight. If "no sunspots", for example, means "weaker solar magnetic field", and there is a nonzero temperature forcing due to solar magnetic flux, we can't ignore that factor when considering "climate change". But we don't know. (I do know we're not looking for any such forcing, though.)
This, by the way, is not an endorsement of the ludicrous "electric sun" theory. I still think our sun's a gigantic fusion reaction, not some kind of weird analog of an arc light...but at the same time I do agree that our traditional examination of the workings of sun, planets, stars, and galaxy do not take electromagnetism into account, and I think it should. As tenuous a coupling as it is at astronomical distances, it's still coupling, and coupling means energy transfer.
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Well, thanks to repeated power failures, I'm behind on my anime. I think I'll try to watch some before that squall line hits....