Oh, No, We Didn't Say That

No, no, no.

<monty python>Yes. A bit.</monty python>

Yes, yes, you probably did. (That's the US Government 'you', not to be confused with the American People 'you', unfortunately, the royal you, or the 'hey you' 'you'.) You renamed French Fries "Freedom Fries", for Christ's sake, one of the single stupidest things I've ever witnessed in my life -- and I've both been to a frat party AND gone drinking with Welsh exchange students, so don't give me that 'sheltered life' look.

If renaming food doesn't qualify as blatant, outright, idiotic attempts to smear someone, then we must have differing definitions of "smear".

Now, I admit the article doesn't discuss the food thing. It discusses 9 'allegations' that may or may not have been part of an orchestrated campaign to smear France.

Looking back on the lead up to 'war' in Iraq, would everyone with 2 or more milliliters of sense please raise your hand if you smelled smearage?

I thought so.

Thank you, sensible people, and, while I've got your attention....please remember to vote this paper-mache idiot of out office next November.

This concludes today's public service announcement.

Multiplying Rabbits

There is an origami garden at my desk. Animal park, I guess. The traditional crane, peacock, and a couple very unique pieces....and a zillion little rabbits.

Had to be a zillion little rabbits, 'cause, you know how rabbits are. They multiply like...y'know...rabbits.

Being Brilliant

Is a hell of a burden. I mean, once people get the idea you're a genius, there's this expectation that a woman as talented, intelligent and beautiful as yourself is wasted on whatever task you're doing at the moment, regardless of what it actually is.

Well, what is it I'm supposed to be doing? No, really. Curing AIDS? But I don't feel like going to medical school.

Why not?

Well...I don't know, it just doesn't appeal as much as studying other branches of science, or history or litera--

Why not? Women like you should be running for president.

Well, yes, I'd probably do a good job, but the investment to get there is horrendous, a kind of deliberate sacrificing of your soul on the altar of public perception, and I'm not sure I could do it long enough to actually make it to the presidency and I don't want to look back on a failed political career and hate my life --

Why not? You should be CEO!

CEO's spend all their time running around schmoozing. I don't want to be CEO. Captain of the ship, yes, CEO, no --

Why not? You could be saving the world!? You should be saving the world!

Do you mind? What the hell kind of question is that? Why do I need to justify my career decisions because I'm some kind of smarty? Do smart men hear this, or is it just women? What is the definition of success? I want to look back on my life and not have regrets. To know I made good choices when I could. That I served others. That I made the world better by being in it. What is the best way to do that? How can anyone answer that question and know they're right?

My entire work life I've gone from job to job filled with people shocked and appalled that I'm there instead of Somewhere Else using all of my big brain to achieve something Big™. Important.

Well, I am doing something important, dammit. I'm

a. Living my life. I don't want to save the world 24/7. I want to go on vacations, and play with my cats, and read, and maybe go out on a date occasionally.
b. Paying my rent. Even Buddha had to eat lunch, y'know.

Sigh. Is it just smart women that hear this? Is it?

Color Me Stunned


U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties

*grk* *ag* *thunk*

As in Dance, So in Love

Good dancers make good lovers, says survey

Men who know how to move on the dance floor know all the right moves in the bedroom, according to a new report.

Interesting article. I wonder what the real correlation is. The article touches on shyness on the dance floor matching shyness in bed, but not why, in any depth. (also, over-the-top flashy dancers...)

If you're so conscious of your body on the dance floor, I say, it implies you will be over-aware of your body in bed. In both cases, this means an inability to relax, and enjoy the moment, the motion, and -- let's be blunt -- the rhythm. 'Cause finding the rhythm is important, baybee.

I propose two major contributors to such self-consciousness:

1. insecurity -- about your looks, about your social standing (i.e., not wanting to look like a dork)
2. hyperconsciousness -- lacking the facility of being in the moment from a Zen perspective, unable to lose yourself in the task at hand. Overthinking the situation.

There's probably more, I've suffered from both, although once I'm dancing (vertically or...horizontally, ahem), it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Oh, but asking them to dance, and you can read that either way, is still mortifying. What if they say no? What if they hate my moves? What if? Well, if you don't ask, you'll never know, will you? So, how badly do you want this dance?

Anyways, a thought-provoking article.

Hats off to Scalzi, for the link.

Matters of Life and Death in the Feline World


1. food bowl to remain full
2. water dish -- clear, full, eminently splashable.
3. litterbox clean (or, operators standing by to open doors, windows and other avenues of exit to the outside)
4. attention when, if, and only as desired

Violate too many of those in short order and you may find yourself subject to a severe lesson from the outraged feline.

Take, for example, Number One Cat, Pepper. Pepper is smart. If she had thumbs, I'd hide the keys to my truck. Hell, she doesn't have thumbs and I should probably hide the keys.

Pepper has been subject to some indignities recently. Mom (me) out at all hours, lying down and doing situps instead of remaining stationary as a good heating pad should, reading thick books that take up lap room, not sharing the tuna, visiting friends instead of staying home to pet her and Number Two Cat, Gina.

Oh, the humanity. Or, as she puts it, mrow. (oh, the felinity).

So, this morning, within mere moments of filling the water bowl to its designated degree as specified contractually, I nattered about and paid a few bills, walked back into the kitchen and promptly fell prey to Do Not Mess With The Cat Lesson #1: copious quantities of water on linoleum is both invisible in dim light and very slippery.

I went from vertical to horizontal in 3.8 picoseconds, narrowly avoided breaking my leg or pulling any major muscle groups, and looked up to find the Lady of the House grooming herself in that way that communicates quite clearly that those big clumsy hairless thumbed cats lacking lightning-quick reflexes had better know their place and stick to it, by Bast, or there'll be hell to pay.

I stand, er, lay, corrected.

Pardon the Cynicism

Traffic Pollution Damages Male Fertility

Well. Now men have a real reason to be pro-environment, pro-electric car, pro-renewable-resources.

Verdi's Otello

Janis and I went to go see Verdi's 'Otello' Sunday at the San Diego Opera. We're the tall brunette and buxom blonde over on the left balcony, the ones cracking each other up during intermission.

No, no, farther over. Yeah. That was us.

It was, in a nutshell, wonderful.

Otello is, of course, a version of Shakespeare's Othello. Magnificent opening, set at the start of Act II of the play, when Othello arrives triumphant at Cyprus. There's lightning flashing, people running all over the place -- it was amazing.

You miss a little setup by starting in Act II, but also, oddly, I think, gain more insight into Othello's basic insecurity. He doesn't think he's worthy of Desdemona, which is what makes it so easy for him to believe Iago's lies. Iago, however, gets painted I think less complexly than he deserves. There's jealousy, and a lot of it, but there's also a delight I think in manipulating people for the sake of manipulation. He just can't resist.

Desdemona sings this lovely, light (not lighthearted, light, almost sotto voce) Ave Maria before going to what will become her deathbed. Subtly stunning.

All the voices were uniformly superb, the costumes fabulous, and the whole crowd boo'd Iago during curtain call, which he loved.

The sets, for every production we've seen, have been uniformly incredible. Just incredible.

This is the last opera Janis and I will go to see together this season (though I'm going to see Butterfly with someone else), and we're already making plans for a full 5-opera subscription for next season: Turandot, The Pearl Fishers, Don Carlo, Katya Kabonova, and La Traviata.

It's Clueless Git Time!


DOD: Iran tries to derail Iraqi democracy

So. American-style democracy is the One True Path, is that it?

I'm sorry, it's getting really hard to tell extremist bad guys from the good guys these days.

How about -- bear with me, here, I know it's a revolutionary idea -- asking the Iraqi people what kind of government they'd like? For all I know, the current structure just needs a new president. (Much like my own country...but I digress.)


Y'know, as a rather more detailed side comment: the first time I heard the the US is planning on splitting Iraq up into 3 administrative regions I was

a. appalled;
b. not surprised that this would seem logical to a desk-jockey half the world away. "There, that's tidy, isn't it?"

B., I hope, is self-explanatory. A., however, is apparently less so. What happens when you lump together regions and associations that may have very little in common beyond geographical proximity and force them into a new province?

They're going to point at each other and argue, or worse. "Oh, I'm not in his group. No, no no. He's a fill-in-the-blank."

Why is it necessary to modify the country's existing systems into a new structure that literally is the result of some poor schmuck at the Pentagon drawing a few lines on the map of a place they know nothing about? That's just begging for internecine squabbling.

Why is it necessary to recreate the idea of region or province or state or county with new boundaries?

Why cannot the previously-existing 18 governorates (muhafazat, singular - muhafazah) of Al Anbar, Al Basrah, Al Muthanna, Al Qadisiyah, An Najaf, Arbil, As Sulaymaniyah, At Ta'mim, Babil, Baghdad, Dahuk, Dhi Qar, Diyala, Karbala', Maysan, Ninawa, Salah ad Din, and Wasit continue to exist as such?

One of these things seems a hell of a lot easier and sensible than the other.

Breast as Sexual Object

A remarkable couple of entries over at Alas, A Blog on breast-feeding.

Breast-Feeding at a Business Meeting (Ampersand)

More on the Trials and Tribulations of Breast-Feeding (Bean)

Bean's right. The breast has been sexualized so thoroughly (at least in white American culture) that you literally cannot see a breast without it automatically being perceived as sexual.

A breast doesn't exist for you to oogle. Breasts exist as vehicles for milk delivery to potential offspring. Female mammals have 'em. Period. Full stop.

So, what choice can a reasonable mother make -- nurse or let baby go hungry because some asshole who can't see past his elbow to the fact that all that sexualization of the breast is not only gravy but completely irrelevant to the task at hand, might get a stiffy? Aw, poor stiffy. It makes about as much sense as getting turned on by watching someone drink from a bottle of water.

Is it the bottle of water that's the problem, or the eye of the beholder?

Window to Your Soul

Lovely essay by Jeffrey Gordon on the importance of communication skills -- Articulation acts as window to soul. I'll go a few steps further than he does: being able to speak clearly implies -- quite rightly -- that you are able to think clearly.

Another Fusion Reaction tip. Thanks, Faz!

Collections

Faz asks, what do you collect?

I collect maps (I've waxed rhapsodic on the subject before, I know), cookbooks, and foreign-language dictionaries, mostly. The dictionaries, I think are an outgrowth of my earlier collection of 'thank you' in different languages. I just like language, I guess.

I would like to collect sheet music. Interesting that everything on this list is made of paper, isn't it?

I guess the biggest thing I collect, really, is interesting experiences, which aren't exactly things you put on the coffee table and admire, although I always bring back a momento from my sojourns and put it on the coffee table.

Anyway. What else do I collect? Oh, yeah. *blush* Film versions of "Wuthering Heights".

I get it!

Scalzi wrote:

...particularly among the dim-witted who cannot hold two thoughts in their brain at the same time.

...in the course of some other remarks worth reading. I just stopped and had an epiphany (good thing I was stopped, first). Why can't these people hold two thoughts in their brain at the same time?

Then it hit me, like a neutrino through 16 zillion cubic centimeters of anxious water. Duh.

It's a Pauli Exclusion thing at work here. Makes perfect sense. Two fermion-like thoughts cannot exist in the same brain at the same time!

Ha! One more of life's conundrums solved.

Ok, darn cool

Odd things in Pitt's libraries, via Breaching the Web.

Know what got me? The Chinese Sky During the Han: Constellating Stars and Society. Doesn't that just sound neat?

Sometimes I wish I worked in a library.

Why?

The battle for American science (courtesy of Medley)

One of the first signs that something was changing came in March last year in the suburbs of northern Atlanta, when people started talking, a little more frequently than might be expected, about mousetraps. It was hardly unprecedented in the US that a group of local parents should be lobbying for their children to be taught that evolution was a disputed theory, not a fact. But the way some of them were doing it was new, which is where the mousetraps came in. Unlike some of the openly evangelical Christian lobbies, they didn't want schools to teach creationism - the theory that God created the universe in seven days - they only wanted to air a theory known as Intelligent Design. ID holds that the living cell is "irreducibly complex", like a mousetrap. Remove the spring from a mousetrap and it isn't just an inferior mousetrap; it isn't a mousetrap at all. It had to have been created by an intelligent designer. It was the same, they said, for cells, and so life must have been designed by some kind of intelligence. Critics called this "stealth creationism" - religious dogma masquerading as science - but the ID proponents got their way, thanks partly to wording in President Bush's new education bill. Schools in Atlanta are now theoretically entitled to "teach the controversy" (though officials have urged teachers to stick to evolution for now, sparking a lawsuit) - and textbooks presenting Darwinism as fact have stickers inside, pointing out that it might not be.

OK. Because smaller components, i.e., atoms, can make up molecules, God must exist. (That's exactly the same as the mousetrap argument -- the reason we think in atoms at all is because they are 'irreducibly complex' -- the smallest chunk of a thing with the qualities of the thing -- iron, chlorine, oxygen. The only difference in the argument is that any 3-year-old can break a mousetrap. It takes a lot more effort on the part of Ph.d's to screw around at the atomic level.)

Can I prove that God exists, based on the statement above? Because smaller components, i.e., atoms, can make molecules, God must exist. Because the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, God must exist.

Because, just to pin that sucker down where it can't move, because collaboration works, God must exist.

Interesting idea.

Can you prove God's existence based on that statement? Can you make predictions based on that statement that can then be tested, and used to validate that 'God' exists?

If you cannot, then you cannot teach this idea in a science class. You can teach it elsewhere, but you cannot call it science, no matter how much you want to.

Science is a method of asking questions based on observations, predicting behaviours, and testing if those behaviours occur. Science is not a thing, it is a process of analyzing the world we live in.

If you want to apply the scientific method to the question of God's existence, go ahead.

If you want to assert that God exists, well, that's not the scientific method. So, go do your asserting outside of science class.