I’ve been asked to speak at a Wright State University forum; their Honors Institute is having a symposium on Chinese-American relations called “Connecting With China”, and I’m to talk on “Exploring Issues in Cross-Cultural Adoptions” from 2-4 pm, February 17th.
The event is free to the public, but you have to register in advance to get in due to space limitations, etc. If you’re going to be in the area, come by! read more…
Couple makes ‘wedding trailer’ as an announcement of their upcoming wedding for family and friends: it’s VERY funny. Helps if you’re some kind of film buff….watch for 2012, Matrix, Bruce Lee and other references in the video.
Look for the Vietnamese subtitles…
In Northern Ireland (and I’m sure my readers will correct me), the political system is way unrelated to the rest of UK politics – its own microcosm. You have a multiple divide in politics there – ethnic, religious, class, minority/majority issues, republican versus monarchist, and who smote who first and last.
When you get these sort of fracture lines, you can either end up with the Judean People’s Liberation Front/People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea (a bunch of various sizes of political groupings and parties, each with a oddly varying agenda) or Big Front Parties (Reds v Fascists) – but you end up with lines, hard lines of us v them, right v wrong, those worthless punks versus our soldiers of God. read more…
The local Sioux Falls paper notes that the voting percentage in the most recent school board election was 3.55% in an editorial asking for voting to be made easier by eliminating precinct voting in favor of at-large polling places scattered around the city.
Personally, I think that’s more likely to confuse the heck out of people used to the old system and drop the vote percentages further as they give up on trying to figure out what to do. The problem is gtting people to get positively involved, if that’s not too much trouble. But read on…
This one is a weird amalgam of the Dayton Daily News article and the Newsweek one. For one thing, it thinks that we used to live in Dayton; the last time I lived in Dayton was 1977, thirty years ago, long before I married Susan.
Another posting of the story has a very nice set of comments from people…and a blog commentary on it is interesting.
Above is a weird line from another Chinese article on the twins that appeared in the Hong Kong news for Yahoo; from the “(Ming Daily) on December 22, 2009 on Tuesday 05:10″
The article (English translation via Babelfish translation) follows after the cut. It seems to be a boil-down of the Newsweek article.
A new book on the 2008 presidential season with lots of behind the scenes goodies has a lengthy excerpt bit on the New York magazine size, where John and Elizabeth Edwards get seriously toasted: entitled “Saint Elizabeth and the Ego Monster” if that gives you a heads-up. It’s pretty brutal.
The line that kept coming back to me on this was: “What were these people thinking?”
The two former aides squirmed in their seats and held their tongues—while John sat staring silently at them from across the table. Ginsberg and Rubey left the dinner astonished by Elizabeth’s herculean efforts at willingly suspending disbelief. But as disquieting for them as the scene was, even more disturbing was the possibility that they were wrong about how Edwards would fare in Iowa. What if he won? What would they do? What should they do?
The thought was occurring in the minds of many old Edwards hands, in Iowa and farther afield. The mainstream media, yet again, was determinedly ignoring the Enquirer. If that trend continued, there was still a chance that John could win the nomination—and thus deliver the White House to the GOP on a platter when the story eventually, inevitably, was proved true.
Epidemic of something killing off a bunch of Portuguese octopi. “Twelve hundred pounds is a lot of dead cephalopod, especially when no one seems to know for sure what killed them.”
Only man to be nuked twice and survive dies at 92.
The Bruce Schneier Action Figure! At $100, it’s a steal! Be the first on your block!
Now, i’m just waiting for the RJ Johnson and Bill Roper Auctioneer Action figures…
…because the first one overloaded the account with all the hits from people wanting to read it:
http://rorr.im/digg.com/movies/two_gentlemen_of_lebowski/
Marmotaged drollery, to be sure. Prithee.
“Two Gentlemen of Lebowski” – a Shakespearian version of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, just as odd. It talks about Johnsons and marmots, so it can’t be all bad.
[Alarums. Enter OLIVER and the two NIHILISTS, bearing a marmot]
Forsooth! This be a place
Of residence, and much a private place.—
O excellent marmot!WALTER
Nihilists! I am beshrewn. Say what thou wilt
Of fascist tenets, Knave; it seeks to stand
Philosophy and politic, not void.
And let it noted be that wildlife kept,
Amphibious rodent, in domestic walls,
Is retrograde to right and civil laws.THE KNAVE
Art thou a forester? A woodcutter yet, or shepherd of the flock? Who cares a fig for th’accursed marmot?WALTER
I speak only to sympathise, Knave.THE KNAVE
I need no sympathy, no emotion.
That I need is only my Johnson.DONALD
Wherefore needest thou thy Johnson, Knave?
We’re facing a foot of snow or better in the next 24 hours, and the phone and internet are *already* up and down like a windowblind today. Highly annoying. Comcast says it’s weather-related failures – which makes me worry about what we’ll do if we get first snowed in and then frozen with sub-zero temperatures!
Also on the tech side, I notice that Wordpress is doing a lot of updates recently; since I oversee a fair number of Wordpress installs, this gets old having to go back and forth and back with patches and backups.
On the issue of phones: I have a cell phone, but I don’t give out the number because I don’t have it on me 24/7; I don’t want people calling it and not hearing from me for days at a time. It’s a Palm Treo – used to be Susan’s – and something is causing it to intermittently lose power and/or reboot. I can’t be sure that it’s going to be in working order at any particular time, in short.
I’m looking at a replacement soon; problem is that it’s tricky because I’m an intermediate user. I don’t Live To Text or email from my cell; the broadband connection fees are too stiff for me to justify the limited use I’d make of it, and I prefer to deal with mail at home on my PC, thanks. On the other hand, I need something of a full-featured PDA on hand for information purposes…
The phone companies have the other ends of use covered, but not mine. Mere’s use of her new iTouch has fascinated the family as well, to the point where Susan is talking about getting an iTouch as a MP3 player /PDA and a simple phone for the phone end of stuff.
I’m researching the new google phone and the Palm Pre in particular, and bookmarking interesting stuff on this line in delicious:
My favorite conservative columnist, Daniel Larison, is hitting it on the head and out of the ballpark this morning about the mindless OMG’ing in the Beltway press and elsewhere about political dishonesty on national security issues.
He brings up two main directions on this:
Examples given:
This is not a new thing; but it’s stupid and irresponsible and cuts across parties. I see the same in preparation for future threats and disasters – a lot of what Bruce S calls ‘security theater‘ for new shiny ways of making people feel somehow secure that are barely thought out at all, combined with vendors who are happy to sell it. That way, you look like you’ve Done Something without ever making sure that it’s worth anything when push comes to shove. You have a set of gold-starred binders in your office saying that everything is cool, and you can forget about it.
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear
In Search of Zarathustra: The First Prophet and the Ideas That Changed the World by Paul Kriwaczek