In short:
Monday morning announcements:
“Dear 20 classes full of high school students, here are some highway patrol officers to tell you the names of popular friends and classmates killed in a drunken driving accident this weekend.”
(a few hours later)
“PSYCH! Not really, we’re just teaching you valuable lessons. Man, we’re awesome. Nothing to apologize for here.”
Words fail me.
So as of today, I'm no longer in my 30s.
We'll see how that goes.
Help Holly Find a Cure for Syringomyelia and Chiari malformation.
To quote:
"I had my first spinal surgery before my 5th birthday. I have had a total of 12 surgeries, 13 spinal taps and too many hospital stays to count... I have decided I want to raise money to find a cure for these problems!"
Raise hands - did you have to deal with anything like this as a teen? Me neither. Any chance you would have handled it with such aplomb? Me neither. Follow the donation link at the site, please...
Add me to the long list of people passing this link along - Cool Running :: The Couch-to-5K Running Plan. I started several months ago, with occasional lapses. But yesterday, I actually ran my first 5K race. My goals were simple:
Mission(s) accomplished.
Goal for the next one: finish my 5K more than 1 minute ahead of the winning 10K runner.
Anyway, the plan works. Well. And that's from a guy who hasn't run since the mid 80's.
Being a huge geek, I of course had a bunch of Perl scripts, during the training phase, that would break up a Podcast at the appropriate intervals, inserting the words "walk", "run", "finished", etc. Nice when running at night, not having to stop and check the watch or the iRiver's timer to see how long the current leg had to go...
Update: I finally got around to packaging up the script as promised. It can be found in all it's only-ever-intended-to-be-used-by-it's-author glory right here.
Says Dave Winer: "I don't have a conflict of interest, I just have an interest."
Dave's always fun to read, since right or wrong, you get his fully uncensored, no-hidden-agenda, all-on-the-table point of view. And even when he's wrong, it's usually in an entertaining and thought-provoking way.
He's right on target in this case, though. Amusing to watch Dave (et al) stomp on pages of bullshit-ridden, ad-hominen crap with a few short sentences.
"For instance, if they genuinely wanted to reduce the incidence of abortion and unwanted teen pregnancy, they’d support birth control education, which they don’t. If on the other hand you want to make women less uppity, fear of unplanned pregnancy is a great way to do it."- Teresa Nielsen Hayden
A middle school marching band in Benton Harbor, Michigan was banned from performing Louie Louie. The Associated Press reports that the school superintendent thinks the song is inappropriate, even though the band is playing an instrumental version.Since then, new, improved, bonus idiocy: the good news -- they've decided to let the band play the song after all. But check out the press release:
[The band directory] was unaware of the sexually explicit lyrics of the song...What sexually explicit lyrics? There are none. Yes, Hoover and crew wasted time investigating the lyrics as (mis)understood by an unspecified number of complete idiots. Yes, it's fun to still pretend that the lyrics are dirty. But they're simply not. Never were. Seriously, should this woman be allowed to drive or leave the house unattended, let alone oversee a school district?
From On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University Press, 2005:
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory. I propose to begin the development of a theoretical understanding of bullshit, mainly by providing some tentative and exploratory philosophical analysis...
Quoted here in honor of Prof. Frankfurt's being a bit full of shit himself.
Update: Looks like this may be a misunderstanding. Good news for many reasons, not least that the book itselfs looks interesting and I'd like to buy it with a clear conscience.
Read, possibly, the finest op-ed in history (via Doc Searls). Then read the new bill, same as the old bill.
Then, write or call your congressperson. Today. Emails don't really count.
Julian Sanchez comments far more clearly than I could about my state's ass-backwards priorities:
The kids will probably end up back in the foster care system, but don't worry: Florida won't risk subjecting them to the influence of a caring adoptive home containing gay people.
If the Aladdin hotel, or any other establishment, doesn't like what a performer says/does on stage, they are of course within their rights to ask that performer to leave, never come back, avoid hitting their ass with the door on the way out.
But...
If I were at a show and some twit onstage started babbling about the wonders of Dubya, and urging us all to Tivo the O'Reilly Factor, and I "tore down concert posters" and "tossed cocktails into the air", wouldn't it be _my_ ass out the door?