If Face is trademarked by Facebook and pod is trademarked by Apple, if I created something called FacePod, would Apple and Facebook collide cataclysmically in their haste to sue me?
The Singularity Is Near
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Those Generic Marauding Political Activists
The story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a headline that describes the hooliganism at a political event: Madison County political fundraiser leads to brawl.
The lead describes some of the mayhem:
A brawl erupted hours after a political fundraiser ended for Madison County Treasurer Fred Bathon when his son punched a prominent funeral home director, police said.
Jacob Bathon punched Mike Weber, owner of Weber Funeral Home, several times in the face at Rusty’s in Edwardsville, said Police Chief David Bopp.
The fight was sparked by Weber’s refusal to place a political sign supporting Fred Bathon outside his business, sources said today.
Never mind, gentle reader, this is a generic young political activist. It could have happened to anyone, much like the political activist adult children who slash tires on election day.
But if you must know, gentle reader, the last line of the Post-Dispatch story identifies, for trivia’s sake:
Fred Bathon is seeking re-election as county treasurer. He is being opposed by Republican Kurt Prenzler.
All indirectly-like, see? The parent of this political activist is opposed by a Republican.
Could be a Libertarian.
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I Didn’t Sign That Paperwork
A friend e-mailed me from his new job, and I saw his signature block was doubtlessly a company recommendation:
CONFIDENTIALITY STATEMENT: This e-mail and any attachments are intended only for those to which it is addressed and may contain information which is privileged, confidential, and prohibited from disclosure and unauthorized use under applicable law. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any use, dissemination, or copying of this e-mail or the information herein is strictly prohibited by the sender. If you have received this transmission in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting all copies from your system.
Dear unnamed company functionary, please note that my receipt and opening a message that came from your servers does not constitute a legally binding agreement on my part. Come and get me if you must, but please spare me the ill-informed bluster.
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Ineptitude Should Be Its Own Reward
Workers’ job skills criticized in report: Those hired at entry level found to be unprepared:
Written communications ranked highest of all deficiencies among new employees. More than 80% of the respondents said the high school graduates they hired had insufficient writing skills, compared with 47% for two-year and technical college graduates and 28% for four-year college grads.
About 70% of the employers found recently hired high school graduates lacking in personal accountability and effective work habits, including punctuality, time management and being able to work productively with others. At the same time, the HR executives said they’re seeking higher skills in foreign languages, creativity and problem solving.
It’s imperative that we raise the minimum wage because it’s inhumane to…. aw, I cannot even fake a good snarky rejoinder. Somehow, though, it always comes out sounding From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
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Perspective Ain’t Just a River in Egypt
Titans tackle kicks helmetless Cowboy, is ejected, and is probably going to be suspended. But let’s go to the Titans coach Jeff Fisher for perspective:
“It’s ridiculous to get to that point. Two back-to-back penalties like that, there’s no place for it,” Fisher said.
Thank you, sir, for that bit of perspective on flagrantly unsportsmanlike behavior and wanton, senseless violence in sports.
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As Cos Intended It
You have not played TI Invaders until you’ve played TI Invaders on the big screen:
On a side note, happy 25th birthday to the Texas Instruments TI 99/4a!
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Ajax Wants To Be A Star
Ajax doesn’t think it’s hard to get on TV:
Sure, that top is 1 15/16 wide, but to Ajax, that’s comfortable.
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Book Report: Nomads of Gor by John Norman (1969, 1973)
This is Book IV in the Chronicles of Counter-Earth saga. In this book, Tarl Cabot (formerly of Earth) goes south to the land of the vicious Wagon People to seek the egg of the Priest-Kings. While there, he meets and impresses the Ubar of the Tuchuks (leader of one of the wagon people), participates in the siege of an unconquered city on the Southern plains, and saves a recent arrival from Earth who was destined to become a slave girl.
This book, unlike the preceding one, goes on a bit more about the slave nature of women and takes place over a longer period and amongst mere men, so it went more slowly than the preceding book. These paperbacks clock in at 350 pages of small print, so they’re longer than the average paperback of the era, but as I mentioned in the review of Priest-Kings of Gor, they’re deep, richly-textured books with a lot of expository information to impart. The exposition doesn’t get in the way of the voice too much as it’s an educational, study-like narrative of the events on Gor, but it does make for some long reads.
The voice of these books, by the way, is very satisfying and fitting for the study they provide. Although Cabot is a storied warrior, he spends much of the time watching the natives in action and occasionally participating to slay a dozen men or something. As such, Cabot retains his link to normal men, making the character approachable and contextual to readers that he would lack if we were a native of Gor or if he were quite the centerpiece of the stories. Instead, the centerpieces tend to be the titular characters and the world they know.
I’ve two more Gor books, number V and VIII; I’m going to shelf them for a while and get on with other things.
As an interesting side note, I tend to leave books out on the end table by the sofa where I read most nights. A couple of times I noticed that I had to dig through magazines and other books to get the book I’d laid down atop the stack the night before. I challenged my wife on it, and my suspicions were confirmed: she was actively hiding the Gor books so people in our homes wouldn’t get the wrong idea about us.
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Wrong Number
If you feel you have reached this message in error, please check your number and dial again:
Since June, area Muslims have become increasingly uncomfortable and even fearful not because of overt attacks or threats against them, but because a sequence of incidents have built upon each other to form an intense, low-grade foreboding.
Beginning with the monthlong Israel-Hezbollah conflict through Pope Benedict XVI’s inflammatory lecture last month, American Muslims say they feel more uneasy in their own country. Local incidents, including the August screening of a controversial anti-terrorism movie and an FBI raid on the home of a Muslim in Columbia, Mo., have heightened the anxiety, according to dozens of St. Louis Muslims interviewed over the last few weeks.
“Muslims are feeling like the world is closing in on them,” said Orvin T. Kimbrough, executive director of the Interfaith Partnership of Metropolitan St. Louis. “They feel like they’re being targeted.”
When our leaders call for your extermination and members of the population start killing you for being Muslims, call us back.
Until then, forebode quietly like the rest of us.
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He’s Also Not Fond Of Other QA Professionals
Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Your #1 Internet Source for "hate technical writers".
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A Low Wattage Tragedy
Cue the violins: 16 horses killed in trailer crash on I-44.
The grisly toll:
Officials say 26 of the 42 horses in trailer survived but nine had to be put down and the other seven died at the scene of the accident.
The authorities are taking heroic measures to save the survivors:
The surviving horses were taken to an arena at the St. Clair Saddle Club, where veterinary personnel were working on them. The highway was reopened to traffic about 11 a.m.
Cole said she did not know what would happen to the horses that survived. She was looking for places for them to stay until their status is cleared up.
“The Highway Patrol made them our responsibility,” she said. “The Humane Society is footing the bill for all of this. We are looking into the legalities as we go along.”
The bureaucracy and its attendant veterinarians are no doubt working through the night to make sure the survivors are healthy and can continue on their journey.
The horses were on their way to Cavel International Inc., a horse processing plant in DeKalb, Ill., authorities said. In a statement today, Cavel said even though the horses were bound for the slaughterhouse, “where they would have been euthanized under the supervision of federal inspectors and USDA veterinarians,” the horses belong to the horse trader who bought them until they reach the plant.
That’s right: these horses are being healed so that they’ll reach the slaughterhouse in prime shape.
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His Master’s Voice
Robert B. Parker has a new Web site and a real blog with comments and everything.
As you know, I give Robert B. Parker and his Spenser novels at least partial credit in raising me, as I read the bulk of his early work in my formative years (see also "Meeting Robert B. Parker").
It’s weird that after twenty years of admiration, he’s suddenly as accessible as, say, Michael Williams is a little odd. I don’t think I’ll have the nerve to actually leave a comment over there.
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Where Have You Gone, Alex P. Keaton?
Michael J. Fox to host McCaskill fundraiser:
Michael J. Fox will be in St. Louis next week to host a fundraiser for Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill.
Well, he is an actor, and so his political thinking skills were suspect from the start.
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Things You Can Find On The Internet
Back in the early 1991, I was a sophomore in college. I’d finally gotten a PC (we called them “clones” in those days) the year before, but I still had my Commodore 64 hooked up on the desk beside the PC, and I still hung out on C64 Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). One, called the City of WISE (Waukesha Information System Exchange, as I recollect), I called every night (because in those days, you had to dial up with your modem to connect to a bulletin board system, and you often had to call late at night when you wouldn’t tie up the phone). I ran a trivia message board, and I even started a message board for a Call of Cthulhu game.
Someone else was going to run some sort of roleplaying game on a message board, and I signed up. But that gamemaster never showed. Instead, one of the other users (Brass Orchid, handle derived from a Samuel R. Delany book I still haven’t read) and I started riffing absurdly, playing somewhat to roleplaying game conventions. Eventually, Brass Orchid collected these messages and sent me a copy on disk to see if we could make some sort of story out of it.
Fast forward fifteen years to the present day, and I’m browsing TextFiles.com, a repository of text files from that era, and I get to thinking about The Forgotten Legacy (as the message board was called, undoubtedly some grand sweeping sword-and-sorcery campaign that we subverted to our own ends). So I Google Brass Orchid by his real name, and lo, there it is, on his Web site:
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
12/21/91; 12:43PM
From: Brass Orchid [3]
We could always play without him. All the GM
does is provide structure and coherence to the game.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
12/21/91; 10:39PM
From: L. S. Creetor [62]
I'll take my bastard sword and stab the Ultimate
Reality in the gut.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
12/22/91; 5:08AM
From: Brass Orchid [3]
The Ultimate Reality suffers 120 HP's damage and
falls, semiconcious, to the ground, muttering, "That
Bastard sure knows how to hurt a guy."
L. S. Creetor collects 20 Exp. Points and finds
the Medallion of Adaptation.
Suddenly, the sky splits open and a stairway to
the stars appears. Branches off of the main stairway can
be seen, dwindling into the distance.
Your move...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Suddenly, I’m nineteen years old again, connecting through LotusWorks, and casting spells I made up on the fly. I can see the wood paneling and smell the light must of my basement room, I can feel the keyboard in my lap (because that’s all we had for ergonomics, you damn kids–you could put your keyboard in your lap), and I played late into the night with my short stories, with my bulletin boards, and with simple games without 3D rendering. I had most of college and all of my life ahead of me, and I was as optimistic as a college Objectivist could be.
Crazy, the things you can find on the Internet. I am of the first generation that can find its youth.
UPDATE: Revised a sentence to make clear I looked for Brass Orchid elsewhere but TextFiles.com.
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Possibly The Wrong Inference From A Headline
Janet Jackson hoping to turn things around.
Janet Jackson wants to moon America.
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I Got Nothing
Let me, then, share Cat Head Theatre’s rendition of Hamlet:
Ah, YouTube, gracious provider of content for the contentedly otherwise contentless.
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Hard Harry Redux
Apparently, some people are still seizing the air, feeling it, et cetera. How quaint; pirate radio stations when all the cool kids have podcasts.
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Book Report: Priest-Kings of Gor by John Norman (1968, 1973)
This book is the third in the series. I haven’t read the first two. Although I have owned a large number of Gor books in my life, I currently have but four. Back near the turn of the century, I was an active eBayer, picking up books and whatnot at garage and estate sales and listing them on eBay. I bought a stack of Gor books at a quarter each and discovered, as they were first printings and second printings, that they were worth far more than a quarter each. I think I sold the 23rd book in the series for almost sixty dollars. So I made my money back on them and kept my eyes open for Gor books in the future. Needless to say, I didn’t sell all of them by the time I was done with the eBay thing. So I have a couple left, later printings.
The Gor books draw a lot of attention because of certain elements within them. Okay, one: women are about chattel in these books. They’re subservient at best and most of the time, they’re slaves. Apparently, some segments of the population like to re-enact this lifestyle according to the books (so much that Gorean sites are banned by some Web hosts). Weird, huh?
The storylines strike me as reminiscient of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Warlord of Mars or maybe John Jakes’ Brak stories. Elements of science fiction coupled with sword and sorcery that was kinda popular for much of the last century. In this book, Tarl Cabot, an Earthman transported to Gor, the planet on the opposite side of the sun from the Earth. Cabot is going to seek the forbidden priest-kings who rule the planet from afar to seek vengeance for their destruction of his city. He goes into Sardor, the mountains encircled by a wooden frontier, armed with only his sword, shield, and wits.
The book is very detailed in the description of Gor, its lifestyles, its species relationships, biology, and so on. Not bad for a third book in the series; Norman gave a lot of thought to what he was doing and what he was going to do.
I liked the book well enough. Enough to read more, but not enough to chain women at the foot of my bed. I’ll read the others I own in the series and maybe pick up a couple more. Because unlike some survivors of collegiate English programs, I can suspend my moral outrage along with my disbelief to enjoy a little hack’n’slashery, although this series probably rises above the most base in the genre in spite of its depictions of women.
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It Only Makes Sense
The CDC recommends regular AIDS testing for people 13-64.
Federal health officials Thursday recommended regular, routine testing for the AIDS virus for all Americans ages 13 to 64, saying an HIV test should be as common as a cholesterol check.
Because you’re just as likely on any given day to eat eggs and cheeseburgers as you are to have sex with an intravenous drug-using homosexuals who trades sex for drugs.
Oh, right, like I’m the only one who tosses that coin every morning.
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First, It’s Puppy Safety Seats, Then It’s Mandatory Booster Seats for Beagles
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tells another heartwarming story of someone with a personal preference who would probably not mind government enforcement of his preference. This time, it’s car restraining systems for pets:
Since then, Rodriquez has beome an advocate for having all dogs in cars secured in the back with safety restraints.
Ad absurdum used to be a logical fallacy. Now, it’s standard operating procedure.
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