Friday, February 04, 2005

*shudder*

These websites has a fascinating comparison of different bullets and the damage they do. I'd never heard of the caviation phenomenon before, but it certainly adds a further element of horror to the trauma of a shooting. Particularly ghastly is seeing how equal-calibre bullets can cause vastly different wounds.

Here are some naïve questions: Do the manufacturers of these bullets deliberately seek results like these? Is their testing on fleshy substances, to test the amount of caviation and shock the wound will inflict? If so, I'd like to have a chat with the guy who designed the slow-killing 5.56...

Thursday, February 03, 2005

Texas Gets Kinky

Musical crackpot Kinky Friedman is running for Texas Governor, and as you'd expect from a guy named Kinky, his press conference sounded like a lot of fun:

"On the 169th anniversary of Lt. Col. William B. Travis' arrival at the Alamo, which would eventually fall to Mexican troops, Friedman laid out his plan to begin the 'de-wussification of Texas.'

'I'm not anti-death penalty. I'm anti-the wrong guy getting executed,' Friedman said. 'Two-thousand years ago we executed an innocent man named Jesus Christ and we don't want to make another mistake like that.'"

All Hail Bob & His Glorious Regime!

Yahoo! News reports that the Georgian Prime Minister has been found dead. His duties will be filled by English character actor Bob Hoskins.

Avalanchers Anonymous

Hoo, boy.:

"A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it."

I'm waiting for my family to develop a new interest in ski trips...

Bullshit. B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. Bullshit.

I opened this article about a school district cancelling the spelling bee, with mild interest, but I became a lot more invested after reading their reasoning:

The administrators decided to eliminate the spelling bee, because they feel it runs afoul of the mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

"No Child Left Behind says all kids must reach high standards," Newman said. "It’s our responsibility to find as many ways as possible to accomplish this."

The administrators agreed, Newman said, that a spelling bee doesn’t meet the criteria of all children reaching high standards -- because there can only be one winner, leaving all other students behind.

"It’s about one kid winning, several making it to the top and leaving all others behind. That’s contrary to No Child Left Behind," Newman said.


Political-correctness run amok? Or does the blame lie in the wording of the NCLBA itself? Is it less about helping those "left behind" to catch up than keeping those who excel from getting too far ahead?

And oh yes: "Winning a spelling bee, she added, 'just meant you were a good speller.'"

A shot across the bow to grammar mavens? Prepare yourselves for far more "would of" and "should of"s in future 'net postings!

In A Quality Far, Far Away

So this is the summer of Star Wars, Episode III. Oh, goody. You can prepare yourselves for the bad acting, rubber puppets, poor writing, and cheap-looking special effects by watching this fan-film, which features all of the above ('cept, you know, intentionally), and is a thousand times more satisfying than the real thing.

And There's A Picture Of A Train

I'll know I've found my ideal man when I get this card for Valentine's Day.

(Note: top card. Getting the second card just means I've found the same type of guy I usually do...)

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Wikipedia Snark Alert

The Wikipedia entry for DONKEY.BAS is good for a snarky laugh, particularly if you're familiar with Andy Hertzfeld's less-than-glowing review:

"The game keeps score between the player and the donkeys. If the car hits a donkey, the donkey gets a point and the player is returned to the start of the road. As the car avoids donkeys it moves slowly up the screen, giving the player less time to react when donkeys appear. If the car avoids enough donkeys the player receives a point and the car is moved back to the bottom of the road. The game displays the number of points earned by the player and donkey but does not end or change when a particular score is reached.

Apart from pressing the space bar, the only control available to the player is to press the escape key and quit the game."

Postulating the Papal Legacy

The Pope is back in the news, and the Washington Post has a couple of timely reviews of books that take a look back at the papacy of J2P2 and its impact on the world:

"Ironically, John Paul II, in his determination to restore the medieval European Catholicism into which he was born, became an inadvertent avatar of a new Catholic fundamentalism. The great question now is whether his defensive, pre-Enlightenment view of the faith will maintain a permanent grip on the Catholic imagination. He has been an apostle of peace, yet the last contradiction of his papacy may be how, if this narrow aspect of his legacy takes hold, he will have helped to undermine peace -- not through political purpose, but through deeply felt religious conviction."

Rebel Sell (More, More, More)

I read through the article put forth by This Magazine: The Rebel Sell. I found it spent a bit too much time at a junior-high level bashing "poseurs" and not enough expounding on their thought-provoking thesis, which is summed up by these two paragraphs:

What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (BMWs).

The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”

Kaboom!

I'm a big "tab" fan when it comes to web browsers. Sadly, my web browsers don't seem to think as much of me; In the past year, I've tried IE (AIEEE!), Safari (the Beta was great, 1.0-->has been v. unstable), and I'm now ensconced in Firefox, which has the distinction of being the least craptacular browser I've yet found.

Having said that, I'm still exasperated at having lost all of my open tabs last night after a crash. Even with the Session Saver extension installed, there's no guarantee of recovering all my tabs upon relaunch (SS is designed for quits rather than crashes.)

So here's my challenge to the browser developers: Admit that your browser crashes (they all do, after all) and add some sort of "tab snapshot" feature that saves your tabs every 5 mins or so in case of a crash. I'm offering this suggestion to them free-of-charge, though God knows some compensation for years of mental anguish and tearing-of-hair would be nice...

All-You-Can-Eat Spaghetti Westerns

Another Nerd Night has come and gone, this one in spectacular fashion, with 14 people in attendance! The large crowd made for a somewhat chaotic evening, with the first 9 people to show trying to engage in a game that seems to be best with 5 or 6. Even with "too many players," though, Bang! kicks ass.

I'd had my eye on this game for months, and finally found one at a reasonable price on eBay (through this guy) before Xmas. It debuted at Nerd Night December, and within two rounds of play had become my favourite game. The gameplay reminds me a lot of Lunch Money, but despite the fact that Bang! has more complexity to it, the play is smoother and - dare I say? - far more entertaining that LM.

This was the first NN where I participated in very few games; I found myself called upon to explain Bang! to a group that arrived in the middle of the massive game (gangBang!?), then to supervise my sister's lesson of Mah-Jong for three newbies (Lesson learned: It's best to introduce one n00b at a time!), tried to follow the fortunes of the group fighting Zombies, and capped the evening with a half-asleep attempt at Fluxx. Next time I'm definitely aiming to play more games! 221B Baker Street, anyone? :)

Monday, January 31, 2005

Deja Vu All Over Again

We've got to protect all our citizens fair
So we'll send a battalion for everyone there
And maybe we'll leave in a couple of years
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World


My first reaction to these lyrics was, whoa - that Phil Ochs was one prophetic songwriter. Of course, it occurred to me that it's less a prophecy than the US warmongers not learning their lessons from Vietnam. But then, can you blame them? Hardly any of them went.

**UPDATED 5:00pm**

Prophet Phil strikes again:
one thing you gotta see
That someone's gotta go over there
but that someone isn't me
So I wish you well, Sarge, give 'em Hell
Yeah kill me a thousand or more
And if you ever get a war without blood and gore
Well I'll be the first to go


Here are some of the excuses used by the chickenhawks to avoid active duty.

BTW for a good laugh, read Rolling Stone's chronicle of Desperate Dick Cheney's attempts to avoid Vietnam.

All We Are Saying Is Give Pop A Chance

While my faith in the media is waning, my faith in pop music revived somewhat this weekend. First I discovered Jaime Paxton's fantastic song "5 Years" amidst a pile of Tom Paxton songs I'd downl... uh, investigated (Quote Mr. Burns, "Yes, that'll do.") Her woefully broken-linked site doesn't yield the promised free download of the song, but by the looks of it there's an album due soon.

The other song that caught my ear was Jeremy Fisher's catchy "High School." It's not particularly standout in its sound - another variant of Goo Goo Dolls/John Mayer generica - but it's obviously on heavy rotation already and so far I'm liking the fact that I'm guaranteed to hear it twice a day. I also love the fact that I first heard it's rather "Adult Accompaniment" lyrics during the mid-morning shift on Mix 99.9 (not worth a link, trust me), the worst of the Toronto radio stations for censoring words in Top 40 songs. Delicious irony also served by the fact that, soon after the song was played, I was subject to the Mix's station identification bumper proclaiming, "Your radio station is a Standard radio station." Boy, they got that right...

Sunday, January 30, 2005

If Helmet Begins to Smoke, Seek Shelter & Cover Head with Hands...

At our local thrift store yesterday, my sister and I found this gem:
The Helmet of Certain Death!™





I can't remember who first noticed the disclaimer, since we both fell down laughing. Luckily, neither of us was wearing the helmet when this happened, so we both survived the experience.

You know, when your helmets warrant a safety advisory, maybe it's time to get start manufacturing something less, oh, life-threatening.