To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Let’s recap the cover girls of Forbes from this year:
Sofia Vergara
Kathy Ireland
Heidi Klum
Obviously they’re looking to increase news stand sales. I forgive them because I’m a forgiver. But not the Justin Bieber cover. That I cannot forgive.
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Also on the heavy commercial rotation during football games is this gem:
I work in QA, so I’m not going to be an early adopter of any computerized gee-gaws inserted into my body.
But I can’t help seeing that infusion of technology into the human body and think about how something like the cyborgization of your cellular phone and body might give the government warrantless access to your body.
No, thanks. Cuh-reepy, and that’s saying a lot coming from someone creepy.
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I borrowed this book from the library specifically for browsing during football games; I started the Sunday night when the Packers played the Giants, but I did not end up watching a lot of football that evening, so it was later that I returned to the book and finished it off during the Eagles-Cowboys game before halftime.
It’s a picture book featuring scenes from Paris. The first bit of text in the book talks about, at a high level, the history of the city from the times of the Parisii through Roman times to the modern day. It covers the famous artists who lived there, and I can’t help note that it puts more paragraphs on homosexuals (Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud) than on individual heterosexuals. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, gets a passing mention in a comma-separated list of people. Perhaps it’s only to emphasize the open, accepting culture of Paris. I dunno. But I noticed it because the culture wars have really made me sensitive to it.
At any rate, I don’t know what to say about the photographs themselves. Paris has a lot of things to depict, so I get the sense one could take meaningful and appealing photographs of Paris if one dropped one’s camera periodically.
Still, the text of the book provided me with some insight into the history of the city and the images were pleasing. So the book was educational as well as useful in my annual march toward 100 books. Which I will not hit this year, but there’s always next year.
Books mentioned in this review:
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This weekend, I was treated to the unmistakable scent of rodent decay in my garage near my work bench. One night last week, when I’d flipped on the light to toss something in the recycle bin, I thought I’d seen a shadow moving across the floor toward my cabinets over there, and when I got the scent, I figured the little fellow had gotten trapped somewhere over there.
So I spent part of my Sunday afternoon moving the mess off of my cabinets and onto my workbench so I could look behind them and clean up as needed. I moved out the table saw that I asked for, and received, for Christmas two years ago that has remained in its box since then as my garage noodling has moved from woodworking to other things. I shuffled aside the collections of glass and wood that I’ve accumulated for just-in-case. I moved the cabinets, which are essentially inexpensive topless cabinets upon which I’ve laid a twenty-five-year-old piece of kitchen counter. I got behind them to find the pegboard hooks and miscellany that had fallen behind them. And ran a broom.
So the dead mouse was just an excuse, and as part of my clean up, I actually disposed of a couple of things. I’ll hang on while someone drags out the defibrillators and charges you back up.
I got rid of:
It took me a half hour to move the stuff around and then sweep up around it. I stopped before I got to the shelves of old paint cans and adhesives, though, because that would have been a whole nother can of depackratification worms. Then I looked in the obvious place for the dead mouse and removed it.
So I’m continuing on my small, measured path to unhoarding.
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Anyone who knew how insurance coverage works expected this: Surprise: New insurance fee in health overhaul law
Your medical plan is facing an unexpected new fee. It’s to help cover people with pre-existing conditions under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
The $63-per-head fee — buried in a recent regulation —will hit health plans serving an estimated 190 million Americans, mostly workers and their families. It’s payable starting in 2014.
Of course, the $63 fee levied by the government doesn’t cover the actual cost of the new mandates, which is why insurance premiums have already gone up before this fee takes effect.
But baby steps, reporters. Baby steps.
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Watching football the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten a heavy dose of this particular commercial:
Message: Chinese laptops make espionage easy.
Really? I guess Lenovo’s exciting ad agency doesn’t remember this:
The United States government is planning to spend roughly $13M USD on computers from Lenovo. The company, famous for buying up IBM’s PC manufacturing arm, is working on a deal with the US government to produce roughly 16,000 computers. Just recently, the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (USCC) has requested that Lenovo be probed for any concerns about possible spying, eavesdropping or worse.
The supposed problem presented by the USCC is that the 16,000 computers are being built by a Chinese-mainland company. The USCC argues that a foreign intelligence like that of the Communist Party of China (CPC) can use its power to get Lenovo to equip its machines with espionage devices. Lenovo has strongly declined that it is involved in any such activities.
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Neo-neocon offers some quotes about governance:
There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” – Daniel Webster
The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. – Robert A. Heinlein
It brought to mind questions my children often ask me about the cartoons and superhero things they encounter regarding the motivations of the villains: Why does Megatron do that? or What does Loki want?
My simplistic answer is always the same: Because he wants to rule people/humans/Autobots. I explain that some people want to just tell other people what to do because they think that they, the tellers, know better than other people, and the other people better do it or else.
I think the oldest boy, in first grade, can understand that from his experiences with his peers. Hopefully, he will learn that acting to compel your peers according to your sense of what the others should do is generally wrong except in limited circumstances (harm to others, Because I’m the daddy and whatnot).
In my Tea Party Republican world, I’m a hero fighting against the forces who would use the government to compel action or behavior from citizens. I know some people think the Republican Party would like to force some behavior on citizens, but it’s not the Republican Party in the legislature nor in the bureaucracy that’s doing things like banning incandescent light bulbs, upping government standards to limit choice (as in CAFE standards for automotive performance), and so on. And where elements of the Republican Party pursues its excesses in this regard, I oppose them, too.
Because I’m a political philosophical superhero, or at the very least someone who agrees with Heinlein and Webster. And hopefully, my children will, too.
Some people
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I said I might get into glass painting. So I’ve done something here:
I guess one can put a candle in it or just put it into the window.
Next time, I think I’ll try drilling a hole into the side before I begin to make it into a night light.
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I know, sometimes crime scenes you leave behind are a little dull. Why not jazz it up with an aphorism?
Come on, make it fun for your profiler. What does it mean? What does it matter?
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….the fiscal cliff everyone was talking about was the fiscal Cliff Clavin?
Discuss.
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Downtown St. Louis has some new jobs promised:
Hudson’s Bay Co., one of Canada’s biggest retailers, said today it is about to present its expanded information technology services operation in downtown St. Louis.
Apparently, the company is moving the jobs because of costs in doing business in Toronto. Also:
Officials have said that getting public incentives from St. Louis and the state of Missouri are key to the job additions.
St. Louis government officials will be on hand to celebrate and to pour the gravy. The center promises 130 jobs in exchange for the public monies. Note that these are promised jobs over the course of some years for monies probably starting now. Also, in what might be a stunning turn of events, over the course of the next few years, there might be a number of Canadian technology professionals relocating to the St. Louis area as their jobs move from Toronto.
If you’ve got to pay businesses to come to your city, you’re doing something very, very wrong. And the city of St. Louis continues to do it very, very wrong very, very eagerly. Because government officials don’t get to go to photo-friendly events when people just open businesses because it’s a good place to do business, with good infrastructure, good schools, and good public services such as police protection.
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We bought a box of the miniature cereal boxes as a treat for the boys. It’s like a hotel minibar for children, and it yields the same gluttonous results.
My beautiful wife, who was once the Health Minister of the Alliance of Free Blogs, was astonished. “That’s six hundred calories,” she said.
Well, yes. They are boy children, and they consume about two thirds of a box of the new and improved 12 ounce boxes of cereal each morning, so, yeah. Wait until they get about twelve and fourteen.
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Headline: Why NASA says Mayans are wrong about predicting the end of time
Article brief, courtesy MfBJN: Because they are.
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This book is a brief (fewer than 100 pages) military history of the Mongols, starting with Genghis Khan. It’s part of a series of short, topical books by Osprey Publishing that look pretty interesting; I’d look for them myself at book fairs, but I recognize that these days, I’m just sniffing among the trash left by Internet-device-enabled book dealers who will find these things before I do and will try to then sell them to me at more than $1 each. Look down there at the price of this one, for crying out loud. It’s almost enough to make me consider not returning this book to the library (but I did).
At any rate, it focuses more on the military conquests of the Mongols starting with the consolidation of their central Asian power base and continuing through their campaigns in Europe, the Middle East, China, and Southwest Asia. Its focus, as I might have mentioned, is on the military strategies and tactics of the Mongols, and the focus really, er, focuses on how brutal they were. This slender volume does not have any of the leavening effect of their administration, religious tolerance, and other homer bits that run throughout Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.
Still, it’s a quick read, with lots of images and maps helping to fill the pages. So it’s more like a long encyclopedia entry than a scholarly book. But a good read and a good primer. Man, I’ll have to seek out some more of these Ospery books.
Books mentioned in this review:
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Good god, man, the United States is an imperialist nation.
You don’t see us measuring things in kilometers, do you?
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So I was discussing homonyms and homophones with the lad today, and I started thinking about words that are both homophones and homonyms. That is, words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings for the same spellings.
Speaking to a six-year-old, an early example that arises is butt which has two meanings (to hit with the head, the backside) and has the same pronunciation as a word spelled differently (but).
So I’ve been kind of zoning out of conversations and whatnot over the last two days as I run through words in my head. I got row (roe). My beautiful wife contributed ball (bawl).
A bit of a word on the homonyms: I disqualify slang words or meanings that are obviously related, like dough (doe), where dough’s meaning for money is because it uses bread as a metaphor or tie (Thai) because the men’s neckwear is called that because you tie it. Although one could argue that the Twin Ion Engine acronym is a different meaning, but it’s a fictional thing and an acronym and not a proper noun, which is okay. You see, the rules are in flux.
Sorry for injecting that virus into your brain’s clock cycles.
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Let’s kill two birds with one stone, shall we?
Problem: The continuing NHL labor dispute.
Problem: Hostess Brands, Inc., liquidating over a labor dispute.
Solution: Open the NHL with replacement players taken from the bakeries.
America, you’re welcome.
(First link seen via Wombat over at The Other McCain.)
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The whole left-right thing continues to lose meaning as journalists continue to use “right-wing” to mean pretty much any political belief they disagree with. Case in point:
A Hungarian far-right politician urged the government to draw up lists of Jews who pose a “national security risk”, stirring outrage among Jewish leaders who saw echoes of fascist policies that led to the Holocaust.
You see, a German fascist who wants to round up the Jews is right wing. Just like small government types in America:
America’s left-wing Occupy movement and right-wing Tea Party are just two examples of the world’s new wave of activists, a diverse and dispersed collection of movements that also includes Spain’s Indignados (the “Indignant”) and the rebellious youth of the Arab Spring.
The smearing of the term to equate Republicans and Tea Party activists as fascists works. In 2004, I remember a friend whose political leanings differed from mine (and, as I surmise it, is no longer a friend because of it) telling me that George W. Bush was going to round up the Jews. He’s not a dumb guy. But he believes it because the convenient, meaningless journalistic shorthand reinforces it.
This just in: As a Republican, I am not a monarchist.
The political term right-wing originates from the French Revolution, when liberal deputies from the Third Estate generally sat to the left of the president’s chair, a habit which began in the Estates General of 1789. The nobility, members of the Second Estate, generally sat to the right. In the successive legislative assemblies, monarchists who supported the Ancien Régime were commonly referred to as rightists, because they sat on the right side.
If there’s one political disposition to centralizing authority in a single government leader, it’s not from my branch of the Republican Party.
Republicans need to make it clear that the whole “right-wing” thing is inaccurate and historically ignorant when it’s applied to contemporary politics, and maybe the journalists and commentators will drop it.
Link breadcrumb trail:
View From The Porch > The Munchkin Wrangler > Hit & Run
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Man, how it pains me to say the words, but I do have a favorite Kenny Chesney song in spite of how he briefly ruined an element of country music with the whole Beach Cowboy schtick that even affected George Strait, for crying out loud.
At any rate, I heard it on the radio the other day. “Young“:
The strangest thing about it is the double-effect nature of it (I am Mr. Double Effect Narrator right here). When I first heard it ten years ago, I was a little wistful appropriately for my teenaged years (although briefly and only at a surface level, of course, but that is the will o’ the wist).
Now, of course, I can be both wistful for its content and wistful for the time when the song was new.
In related news, that particular clock has started on this current song from Eric Church, “Springsteen“:
The first couple of times I heard it, I thought it was a pitch-corrected song by Willie Nelson. I even did the math in my head to figure out how old Willie Nelson would have been when Springsteen came out. Not 17, but young enough to be wistful for now that he’s almost eighty.
Hey, why not something wistful from Willie, then? “Mendocino County Line“, also from 2002 and featuring Lee Ann Womack:
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I guess I’m on a diet since I bought thin-sliced bacon by mistake. Some percentage fewer calories than the thick-sliced bacon I normally buy.
Why, it’s almost like health food.
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