Category: general

I’ll give it to you in Cory Doctorow’s conspiracy-theory martyr writing style:

Surfcontrol.com is a censorware site that blocks parts of the Internet that it considers to be offensive, of an adult nature, or “inappropriate” for some reason or another. They have currently listed this site as an “adult website.” I just got off the phone with a manager at SurfControl, who assures me that they’ve corrected the error, but that it will take 24h for the fix to take hold. During that period, users of Surfcontrol’s paying customers will be walled off from Boing Boing the same way that Chinese and Iranian citizens are prevented from seeing parts of the Internet due to the judgements of unaccountable authorities in those countries.

OH NOES! Somebody at Surfcontrol.com must have seen all those Xeni posts! Quick, let’s pretend she doesn’t post illicit, NSFW images all the freaking time. Yes, BoingBoing is as pure as the driven snow! I can’t believe they got censored! Oh the humanity!

First it was Tom Hanks, and now it’s Tom Cruise. Who’s lined up to be the next Totally Overused Man?

NASA’s Deep Impact probe will (hopefully) smash into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, (hopefully) giving scientists their first glimpse of primordial space dust.

Grammier has likened it to standing in the middle of the road and being hit by a semi-truck going 23,000 mph – “you know, just bam!” The energy produced by the crash will be like detonating nearly 5 tons of TNT.

Man, I love NASA.

Something about the idea of cracking open an ancient comet to reveal the building blocks of the universe kind of puts me on edge, though. I’m sure there’s a great science fiction story in there somewhere.

And who knows…maybe

Voice of Winnie the Pooh’s Tigger dies
Paul Winchell also created voice for ‘The Smurfs’

John Fiedler, voice of Piglet, dies
Actor also starred in ‘Bob Newhart Show’

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has signed off on an order to remove the blue drapes John Ashcroft had ordered to cover two “scantily-clad” statues at the Justice Department.

In the past, snagging a photo of the attorney general in front of the statues has been somewhat of a sport for photographers.

When former Attorney General Edwin Meese released a report on pornography in the 1980s, photographers dived to the floor to capture the image of him raising the report in the air, with the partially nude female statue behind him.

This is pretty hilarious. It’s funny just how far some people go with their desire to remove sexuality from everyday life.

We should all go to the Asuka Onda Festival.

Cat-ear spoilers.

Eight hour drive–successful!

I stopped at Grandma’s on my way out of town, and she gave me one of Grandpa’s Aubrey-Awbrey of Virginia and Kentucky books. I’m thinking of setting up a site for it someday. Grandma gave me permission to republish the material for non-profit purposes.

Again the drive provided ample time to think about plenty of things. This time I pondered that I always think about stopping at various sights along the way, but I hardly ever do. (The one time I did stop, to see Lost Sea, I didn’t actually go into the attraction because it cost something like $15!) Today I thought that I should make a list of all the places I want to stop and visit, and then start doing them all one at a time.

Here are some of them, off the top of my head:

• Anything in Jellico (I just think the name “Jellico” is great)
• Renfro Valley
• The Smokies
• Lost Sea (for real this time)
• Cumberland Falls (I’ve actually been there, a decade ago…I want to go back)
• Colonel Sanders KFC Cafe and Museum (I drove past it once)
• Boonesborough (although I am confused as to whether or not that is actually “Fort Boonesboro”, or just a town with that name…if it’s the latter, then never mind)
• “Adult World” (it’s this huge warehouse of adult products somewhere in Tennessee…seeing it cracks me up every time)
• Gatlinburg
• That outlet mall north of Atlanta
• Any of those places advertising boiled peanuts, homemade fudge, or (in Georgia) peaches and onions
• Downtown Atlanta (yes, someday I would like to actually stop there, instead of just driving through and rubbernecking)

That’s about all I can think of right now. (And that’s plenty, really.)

I also thought on my drive about the name “Conrad” for a boy. Then I thought, “Conrad Leonidas Meadows”. Then I thought, “That child would have a hard life.”

Then I thought, “I’m thinking about having kids again.”

I noticed something interesting on my drive about my MuVo. When I have it on repeat/shuffle all, it will play lots of songs from folders that have lots of songs in them–often the same songs numerous times–but it completely leaves out folders with only a few songs in them. I literally couldn’t hear anything from my “Kyou Kara Maou” and “Misc Anime” folders without changing the play mode to “Repeat Folder” (or “Normal”) and then Skipping Folder to those directories. Weird.

(And yes, before you ask, I did sit there hitting “Next” over and over and over, waiting for one of those songs to come up. They never did.)

My second gas-up took place at a Chevron somewhere in Tennessee. Their prices were actually five cents higher than I’d been seeing elsewhere, but I didn’t feel like going anywhere else. When I was finished, my car pulled its oh-so-cute “What? Start? I don’t know how to do that” routine. I tried it over and over for a long time. When I finally glanced up at the station and thought about going in there for some help, I noticed that it was closed. (Tricky pay at the pump people!) I resigned myself to trying the car again and again until it finally started up. It always startles the hell out of me when it suddenly roars to life after doing nothing but clicking despondently.

I saw two notable billboards on the drive, and I didn’t want to forget them so I actually used my MuVo to record myself briefly describing them. I’d upload the sound file, but it’s really not all that interesting, so instead I’ll just write what the billboards were.

The first one, just north of Atlanta, had a picture of the faces of Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il, and Saddam Hussein, with the headline: “News is important. Now more than ever.”

I wonder what Mr. Kim would think of being lumped together with bin Laden and Hussein. I’m sure if he finds out about that billboard it will do nothing for our diplomatic relations with North Korea.

The second billboard was somewhere east of Atlanta. To get this one you must know that I had previously passed on the same highway a car dealership with a huge inflatable purple gorilla holding a car over his head. The billboard featured a screaming purple gorilla and the text, “The 05 chikins are here.” I was perplexed until I noticed the cow mannequin, and then I laughed out loud. (Literally. And I pounded the steering wheel, too.) Go Chick-Fil-A!

Somewhere near (I think) Covington, Georgia, there was a huge car accident on the westbound side of I-20. Traffic was completely stopped; they weren’t even letting one lane through. As I drove past I counted eight cars on tow trucks or along the side of the road surrounded by police cars. The line of traffic behind the pileup lasted for ages. Towards the front of the line, many people had their cars shut off and were walking around on the median. While I didn’t get a picture of the aftermath of the actual accident or the front of the line, I did take a few of the rest of the line of cars. I also said aloud, sympathetically, “Sucks to be you.”

I made the (admittedly lame) comment to my mom today that if I had a daughter, she’d have to move to South America. (Because Mom moved from Illinois to Kentucky, and I moved from Kentucky to Georgia. We just keep going south. See? Ha, ha.)

Mom didn’t laugh, or even tell me how stupid that joke was. Instead, she very seriously told me that I shouldn’t focus my happiness on something that might not happen. She said she wants me to be happy. She may have even said that plenty of people are happy without children. I don’t actually know. I can’t remember exactly what she said. It’s like my brain shut down when she said it, or started adding to what she was saying, or something.

I tried to say that I was getting over it, but that felt like a lie so I didn’t say anything.

Just watched National Treasure with my brother and his wife (and ha! Now that statement isn’t specific enough to let you know who I’m talking about! It was Ben and Manda).

What a great movie!

I’d heard good things about it, but you know me. Watch movies? Never.

It’s not that I have anything against movies. Hell, I took two film courses in college. I just…never watch them. (And that includes many of the films I was supposed to watch for class.)

But anyway…this movie is fun. It’s very fast-paced–you have to pay attention or you might miss the reasoning behind all the running around. But that’s cool!

There’s more to it than a simple treasure hunt, a lot more. There’s a rival, a love interest, and family conflict. Plus there’s a sidekick type guy who is absolutely hilarious–he gets most of the best lines. All the pieces fit together perfectly at all times. The movie is firing on all cylinders from the very beginning and simply does not let up until its highly satisfying conclusion.

I don’t know (or care) if the story is plausible. It’s done in such a way that I believed in it. And that is what makes for a good time at the movies :)

(Disclaimer: I started crying over a children’s book called Big Brother, Little Brother today. It was just so sweet! “When Big Brother cries like this, who knows why? Little Brother.”

(So, I’m a sap. Bear that in mind.)

Part two of Ampontan’s discussion of Japanese prime ministers, and Junichiro Koizumi in particular, is up. (Part one is here, and here’s where I linked to it.) A tantalizing tidbit:

Has the prime minister of any other country chosen not to hold an election because his party was sure to be successful in that election? Yet that was exactly Koizumi’s predicament.

The article has a fantastic conclusion, and this two-parter has made me simultaneously wish Koizumi wasn’t stepping down next year, and understand why he’s doing it.

It would seem, based on Ampontan’s evaluation, that Koizumi simply loves democracy.

Yokosuka, Japan, site of a United States Navy base, is treating the 2008 decommissioning of the USS Kitty Hawk and its planned replacement with a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier as a major issue in its current mayoral campaign. While all four candidates oppose a nuclear-powered carrier, none have actually come up with a way to keep one from being assigned to the base. (The typical strategy so far seems to be to petition Tokyo.)

Opposition to the nuclear carrier seems rooted in the nation’s deep aversion to all things nuclear. Asahi provides this example of justification for the opinion that nuclear vessels are dangerous:

In July 1998, a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine called at Yokosuka and city officials said they detected abnormally high radioactivity in the water.

This sounds to me like the same pseudoscience fueling the campaign against the use of depleted uranium rounds, but I could be mistaken. Does anyone know if radiation has ever been shown to be higher in the waters around nuclear vessels?

I think this news story demonstrates both the low and the high end of human capability:

Arthur Richardson thought he’d pull a prank and pretend to swallow a friend’s truck key. Unfortunately, Wednesday’s prank backfired when Richardson plopped the key in his mouth and gravity took over.

Richardson went to a doctor Thursday, who X-rayed his stomach and got a clear picture of the key. The doctor said the key posed no danger, but Richardson’s friend needed to use his truck.

So Richardson and his friend took the X-rays to a locksmith, who used the pictures to fashion a new key. And it worked in the truck.

Bravo.

Kevin (who does not have a blog or webpage, because he sucks) linked me to the blog of a friend of his, Jake Zigler, who is staying in Japan for a month. I’ve been enjoying reading about his trip this afternoon.

The writing here is not art, per se. He rambles, and there are grammatical and spelling errors, and the only organization seems to be chronological. This is fine, of course. I’m interested in the content and can therefore forgive a lack of polish.

But I was reminded that even the most haphazard writing can yield powerful prose. During the post describing his anxiety about suddenly being alone in a country where no one speaks English fluently, Jake writes the following:

I’m pretty sure I spelled Caucasian incorrectly and I felt like an idiot and it was in pen.

It’s its own paragraph, following some general situational descriptions. And it works, profoundly.

It’s short and simple. The lack of commas to separate the three independent clauses adds to the effect of feeling overwhelmed. Ending with “and it was in pen” is so much more powerful than starting with that fact; you get the mistake, you get the emotion, and then you get the “oh shit, he can’t fix it, either”.

Wonderfully executed.

A guy passing himself off as a British spy swindled people out of their money for 10 years. He used his “earnings” to finance his James Bond lifestyle. Yahoo! has the story.

Meanwhile, the Leo Burnett advertising agency (for which my uncle once worked) has released the results of a survey of 2,000 men around the world, from which they discovered that men are more complex than advertising campaigns typically give them credit for. Also from Yahoo!.

Ampontan at Japundit has posted the first in a series about Japanese prime ministers.

You will not see an accurate assessment of Koizumi as prime minister for the simple reason that the pundits will base their judgements on the premise that Koizumi is a political leader in the way that term is understood in the West. He is not, and never has been. The Japanese political commentators should know better (and probably do, but their careers and self-esteem depend on pretending that Japan is run like the other industrialized countries), and few foreign journalists take the time to understand how the Japanese government works, much less try to explain it to their readers.

It would seem that Ampontan has stepped up to the plate!