Category: general

I am sooooooo tired of MSN’s “Test Your ____ IQ” quizzes. IQ stands for intelligence quotient, morons, not “knowledge of trivia”.

The editors of Merriam-Webster dictionaries got more than 3,000 entries when, in a lighthearted moment, they asked visitors to their Web site to submit their favorite words that aren’t in the dictionary.

[…]

Some of the proposed words even gained multiple submissions so the editors came up with an admittedly unscientific Top 10 list.

In first place was “ginormous” – bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous – followed by “confuzzled” for confused and puzzled simultaneously, and “whoot,” an exclamation of joy. A “lingweenie” – a person incapable of making up new words – was tenth.

I kinda like that “lingweenie” bit, though I’ve never seen it before. I’ve seen “ginormous”, “confuzzled”, and, of course, “whoot”/”wh00t”, in use on the web.

Check out the full article at Yahoo!

[Noting my shirt] “You like Star Wars, huh?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Cool! You’d get along with me and my dad!”

[…]

“You’re married? How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Wow, like, I didn’t guess, ‘cuz you look real young, an’ yer not wearin’ rings–“

“I take them off sometimes, because…arthritis.” (I don’t know if it’s arthritis or not, but my fingers do get sore when I’m typing while wearing my rings.)

“My mom used to say that. Now they’re gettin’ divorced!”

[…]

[As we walked into the apartment] “Whoa, you decorated? You really are married.”

[…]

“So, when’s dinner?”

[…]

“You like wood a lot.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve got lots of wood furniture.”

“Er. Yeah.”

[…]

“Got any kids yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“You seem like you’d be a really good mom.”

“I’d like to be.”

“Hey, I’m available! I could move in, and just sleep here on the couch…”

[…]

“Are your computers hooked up to each other? If they’re connected, you can play games together.”

“Yeah, they are.”

“I could move in, and just stay in here and play video games all night!”

“That’s what my husband does.”

///

Needless to say, he was an outgoing person :>

Some of you out there might be thinking I got taken for a ride. The thought had crossed my mind. But, you know, the magazine isn’t for me. It’s a weekly children’s magazine for Connor, filled with games and activities :) So I don’t really feel bad about getting talked up by a high school guy for however long that was.

I am getting tired of “the media”, and fabricated stories, and misquotes, and the lack of fact-checking.

This is just ridiculous.

Newsweek said in its May 23 edition that the information had come from a “knowledgeable government source” who said a military report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay found interrogators flushed at least one copy of the Koran down a toilet in a bid to make detainees talk.

But the source later told the magazine he could not be certain he had seen an account of the Koran incident in the military report and that it might have been in other investigative documents or drafts, Newsweek said.

The result?

The report sparked violent protests across the Muslim world — from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan, Indonesia and Gaza. In the past week the reported desecration was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League.

Newsweek hasn’t fired anyone, or even retracted the story [edit: as of around 9pm, they have finally retracted the story]. And many people don’t believe the “correction”:

Muslims in Afghanistan were skeptical about the turnaround on Monday.

“We will not be deceived by this,” Islamic cleric Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman told Reuters. “It comes because of American pressure.” Aman was the leader of a group of clerics who vowed to call for a holy war against the United States.

So, thanks, Newsweek. If your goal was to incite further hatred against the US and raise the possibility not only of dragging out the current war but bringing down more and more war upon our heads…well, congratulations. A fucking plus.

Simon’s got a funny little piece today about how his manners and the language he’s picking up from his wife are causing him to seem, well, gay.

Living with three women I hear and learn a large proportion of my Japanese by listening to the family communicate. Of course they use expressions of a feminine nature which when used by a member of the opposite sex sound like I am emulating Julian Clary AKA The fairy.

This, combined with his natural politeness, cause him to come across like a “60 year old woman”.

A Japanese man on the other hand (apart from not asking for assistance in the first place) would thrust a map under the nose of a worker and jab at the desired destination until the worker relented and found it out for him. In a restaurant if I ask for a glass of water I nod in a gesture of thanks. A Japanese man would turn and blow cigarette smoke in the waiters eyes. It’s just what they do.

Are Japanese men truly all this rude? The cute middle school boys in anime like Prince of Tennis would have me believe that at least some of them, while self-confident to the point of arrogance, are at least kind and thoughtful. Is this wishful thinking on the part of the anime?

From Mainichi:

Hishikari Junior High School officials said the four girls had either shaved their eyebrows or cut them too short to be acceptable.

Teachers pointed out the girls on the morning of the April 6 ceremony. The girls were told that their eyebrows were unacceptable.

“In a pre-enrollment meeting, I explained the school’s requirements regarding appearance and uniforms, but they did not abide by these instructions, so I decided that it would be difficult for the four to take part,” principal Toshinori Hoka said.

Were the eyebrows completely shaved off? Or were they just thinned out, like lots of women do here in the US? Seems like a weird rule either way.

Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing excerpted a bit of a cool NYT article…and left the image caption in as if it were part of the article text.

In case she revises, here’s what she posted. I’ve italicized the image caption.

Laleh Seddigh stepped on the gas, cut off a truck and blasted her Peugeot between two other cars. “I prefer to drive by myself,” she said, seeing her passenger steadying himself with a hand on the dash. “In case something happens – it’s a very big responsibility.”
“I like competition in everything,” Laleh Seddigh said. “I have to move whatever is movable in the world.” With that, she broke around a blue pickup, accelerated past an Oldsmobile and swerved onto an offramp, past a billboard of Ayatollah Khomeini and a 30 kilometer an hour speed-limit sign, doing 80 k.p.h., or just under 50 miles an hour. Ms. Seddigh loves speed. She also loves a challenge. Last fall, she petitioned the national auto racing federation in this male-dominated society for permission to compete against men. When it was granted, she became not only the first woman in Iran to race cars against the opposite sex, but also the first woman since the Islamic Revolution here to compete against men in any sport. What’s more, she beat them.

“I like competition in everything,” the striking 28-year-old said after parking the car and going for tiramis? in a cafe in North Tehran. “I have to move whatever is movable in the world.”

I investigated this because it was shocking to me that copy editors at the NYT would let the same quote be placed twice in the same article, within a paragraph of each other. Of course, it turned out that that wasn’t the case.

Moral of this story: Copy and paste is dangerous!

[Edit 5:35pm: As expected, she edited ;D]

I just bought a magazine subscription from a high school senior so he can hopefully go on a trip to Cancun. I also gave him a brownie, freshly baked.

Now, where’s my knitting?

Via Duncan’s recently-updated website, I’ve discovered Eric Thigpen’s blog. Eric, like Duncan, was in kung fu with me years ago. While I was going to UK, I bumped into him a few times, including during an astronomy class we happened to have together, and at the movies (I forget which one, but basically he snuck up on my right while I was babbling away to Margaret and tried to scare the shit out of me by grabbing my shoulders. He was rewarded with a cool “What do you think you’re doing?” level gaze, until I realized who it was).

He’s in Iraq now. I didn’t even know he’d joined the service.

From his most recent entry:

Part of me feels like I owe the Iraqi people an apology for my lack of service. One of my biggest regrets to date is the day I witnessed the car bomb in Hilla. Over 100 were killed no more than a few hundred yards away from where I was standing. In a moment of uncertainty someone made the call to return to our base. I often wonder about the civilians that lay dying in the streets that we abandoned as we ran away with our first aid kits, weapons and training. We squandered an opportunity that day to do something great for someone else. We’re all going to feel deaths sting some day and if I had to choose between slipping away from this life in a sterile hospital room or being killed while trying to give life to someone else, I would honestly prefer the ladder.

I’ve added his LJ to my blogroll.

Aren’t they fascinating? I mean, it’s just so easy to be taken in by their stories–so easy to fall into the “romance” of it.

A smartly dressed man found wandering in a soaking wet suit near an English beach has baffled police and care workers after he refused to say a word and then gave a virtuoso piano performance.

Isn’t that great? I love it!

It seems that there is a very narrow window for the acceptance of eccentricity. If this guy had done all of the above naked, for example, the story wouldn’t be romantic at all. It’d maybe be funny, but that’s it. And if this guy had gone around shooting people wearing a soaking wet suit, then we’d all be shaken and unhappy about it (and condemning, too, and rightfully so). No, we like our weirdness to be nonsexual and nonviolent. Harmless.

I guess we can like anything as long as it doesn’t harm anyone or challenge our belief systems. I’m not sure that it’s even really “like”, though…it’s acceptance, but in a condescending way, like, “Aww, isn’t that cute!”

Well, now that I’ve analyzed the hell out of how society deals with eccentrics, this story has lost a little of its charm.

But not much. I mean, he won’t speak, but he’ll play classical piano music for hours! How awesome is that?

;>

I can’t come up with ways to reach goals that take longer than a day. I can’t seem to lay out a plan and then follow through unless someone gives me a path. In college I just fucked around until I found something interesting, and then I simply followed the track until I had the credits to graduate. That’s really the only major goal I’ve ever accomplished, and it was nothing more than a combination of dumb luck and goofing off.

The responsibility for breaking us out of our month-to-month lifestyle is mine. If I want something greater, I have to find a way to reach it myself.

I don’t know how.

Got this from Goei. It’s pretty bad.

You scored as White. You were Meant to be White Ok whitie run along. White 60% Black 35% Asian 25% Mexican 20% What Race Were You meant to Be? created with QuizFarm.com

Whaddya know…

That’s where I am with this whole sidebar issue. Basically, I’m trying to minimize my sidebar as best I can while still leaving the functionality there, so that the majority of the information will be available above the fold. I’ve checked out countless people’s solutions for JavaScript collapsible menus, and that looks promising, but I’m just at that point. I can’t think about it anymore.

Maybe I’ll go try to write another story.

Oh goody, the Word Verification Post Killer is back.

Anyway, I got this World View quiz from Miss Em. (It seems familiar. Have I taken it before? o_o)

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis. Postmodernist 81% Cultural Creative 75% Existentialist 75% Idealist 63% Modernist 44% Materialist 38% Romanticist 31% Fundamentalist 25% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

So, you can style input boxes, buttons, and scrollbars, but you can’t style drop-down lists.

In other words, I can put a cool flat color border around my searchbox, but I can’t (say) style a drop-down menu of my archives in the same way. No, instead, the drop-down will garishly reflect my operating system. Right now I have the “Rose” theme on in Win2K, so you can imagine how those colors would clash with my blog template.

Why are drop-downs constrained by the OS?

The only way around this problem, apparently, is to give up on using <select> at all, and construct an elaborate menu using CSS and JavaScript. This is all well and good, but I’m not sure if that will work with WordPress’ get_archives Template Tag.

Why can’t I be happy with just using a default template? :>