Looks like there’s some free speech/religious intolerance issues at my old university, involving a student-run paper that I worked on for a while.
Where’s Ken?
Top baby names of 2006:
Girl Names
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Boy Names
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Lost In Translation
After translating the titles from English-to-French and then back from French-to-English, using Google Translate….
ALBUM: BANDAGE CLUB OF SGT. PEPPER’S OF LONELY HEART’S
Side One
- "Bandage Club of Sgt. Pepper’s of Lonely Heart’s"
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“With A Little Of Assistance Of My Friends”
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"Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"
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"Being Better"
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"Fixing A Hole"
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"It Leaves The House"
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“Being With The Profit Of Mr. Kite”
Side Two
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"At Home Without You"
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“When I Am Sixty-Furnace”
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"Rita Beautiful"
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“Good Morning Good Morning”
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“Band of Lonely Hearts Club of Sgt. Pepper’s (Begun again)”
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“One Day in the Life”
ALBUM: ACCOUNT WITH SUSPENSE-
"To Want To Be Startin’ Somethin’ "
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"The Baby Is Mine"
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"The Girl Is Mine"
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"Account With Suspense"
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"To Beat"
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"Billie Jean"
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"Human Nature"
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"P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Person Thing)"
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"Mrs In My Life"
ALBUM: A LINE OF CHORUS
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"
Opening: I Hope That I Obtain It" -
"I Can Do That"
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"With The Ballet"
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"To Sing!"
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"Assembly, Pint. 1: Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love"
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"Assembly, Pint. 2: Mother "
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"Assembly, Pint. 3: Gimmy the Ball "
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"Nothing"
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"Dance: Ten; Look At: Three "
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"Music And The Mirror"
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"One"
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"What I Did For The Love"
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"One (Recovery) /Finale"
Friday’s 1980s Videos Explained: “Safety Dance” Edition
Here we go:
Lars and his midget/jester companion (Greeble) are traveling through the English countryside for no apparent reason when they come across a chick lass with long flowing locks. She is obviously insane, having fallen victim to the Stupid Plague — a terrible affliction of the mind which causes adults to dance around like blithering idiots and contort their arms into an ‘S’ position (leading to the name "Stupid Plague").
Almost immediately, Lars and Greeble become infected. Greeble is infected much worse, because he is a tiny man and has less resistence to the disease. The three decide to walk through the main road of a dirty village in order to infect as many people as possible.
Soon the Stupid Plague decends on the entire hapless village, prompting everyone to engage in an impromptu Renaissance Festival, complete with maypoles, Punch & Judy puppet shows, burly men banging big sticks together, and dancing chickens.
Lars (played by Eric Roberts) doesn’t seem to be enjoying the festival as much as everybody else, but that’s because he has to constantly brush the hair out of his face. (This takes place long before the days of barbers and — let’s be honest — hygiene).
The fun ends when a WWII aircraft drops several tons of bombs on the carnival, hoping to prevent the spread of the dreaded plague.
Kirk Cameron Should Return To Acting
Bad as he was, at least he was a better actor than he is a logician.
Here’s Kirk’s powerful scientific argument to prove the existence of God:
“Darwin said in order to prove evolution, which is the #1 alternative to God, you’ve gotta be able to prove transitional forms. One animal transitioning into another. And all through the fossil record and life, we don’t find one of these…a croco-duck.”
Hey, Kirk… why don’t you hold up an actual photograph of God? What? You don’t have one?
You see, Kirk is displaying his own ignorance of what evolution is, in order to strike it down as an untenable theory. No scientist — ever — has suggested that transitional forms involve the melding of two present-day animals from entirely different species.
There are, however, many fossil records of animals that have features of both reptiles and birds — the Archaeopteryx, for example, was a bird, which had many features of reptiles, including fused trunk vertebrae, teeth instead of a bill, pneumatic bones, and so on. Furthermore, on a molecular level, today’s crocodile has more in common with a chicken than it does a viper.
Sorry, Kirk, but the facts are more convincing than your Photoshop skills and amateurish logic.
Kirk’s other argument boiled down to this: "Hey, I see a painting, so I know there must be a painter. I see how complex the human body is, I know there must be a designer."
It’s one of those mindless circular arguments built on the foundation of one’s own ignorance — i.e. — "since everything I know has a designer, then man must have a designer". In other words, I’m ignorant about what I know, so I’ll extrapolate that ignorance to everything else."
Well, Kirk. Here’s a relatively simple explanation (in two parts) of not only how it could happen — but how it actually did happen — without a designer (or, if you prefer, with a designer who pulled the strings of evolution):
Now go away, Kirk.
iPods Can Screw Up Your Pacemakers
Interestingly, the researcher behind this study is a 17-year old high school student. He notes however, quite correctly, that most people with pacemakers don’t have iPods.
Rape By Fraud
This is one of the cases that you get in law school, or even on a law exam:
The unusual case dates to a night in January 2005. The woman had been living with her boyfriend, Duane Suliveres, for several years in a furnished room in the basement of his father’s home, according to the defense brief. His brother, Alvin, had been staying in another room for several months.
The incident happened when Duane was working the night shift at an envelope manufacturer in Westfield, the brief said. At 3 a.m., the woman later told authorities, she was awakened by the sound of the door opening in the dark room and said, "Duane, why are you home so early?" but heard no response. Then, she said, she felt someone who she thought was her boyfriend get into bed, remove her clothes, and climb on top of her. They had sex for about 10 minutes, she told police.
After he got up, he opened the door and she saw in the light from the hallway that it was Alvin Suliveres, she told authorities. She contacted the police shortly afterward.
So, in essence, she thought she was having sex with Duane, but it was really Duane’s brother, Alvin.
The legal question: Was this rape?
The high court of Massachusettes ruled yesterday — no, it is not rape. "Rape" is defined (in Massachusetts, like most other states) as sexual intercourse by force and against one’s will. There was no force.
I think the ruling is, sadly, correct. Although I wonder why Alvin wasn’t prosecuted for something else — i.e., fraud, false pretenses, or a host of other crimes.
I Promote Punctuation
When I say "I promote punctuation", I don’t mean that I am promoting being punctual.
I mean, I want to promote this – the interrobang:
From Wikipedia:
The interrobang is a rarely used, nonstandard English-language punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of a question mark and an exclamation mark. The typographical character resembles those marks superimposed one over the other, and the name interrobang comes from interro – from interrogative – and bang – used to amplify the exclamation. In informal writing, the same effect is achieved by placing the exclamation point after or before the question mark; e.g., “How could you do such a thing?!”
American Martin K. Speckter concocted the interrobang in 1962. As the head of an advertising agency, Speckter believed that advertisements would look better if advertising copywriters conveyed surprised queries using a single mark. He proposed the concept of a single punctuation mark in an article in the magazine TYPEtalks. Speckter solicited possible names for the new character from readers. Contenders included rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest, but he settled on interrobang. He chose the name to reference the punctuation marks that inspired it.
Now if I can only find it on my keyboard….
Attack Of The Killer Squirrels — Part III
Last November, I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) about the terrorist squirrels.
Sure, you laughed. But now are you laughing????
Story and video: Violent squirrel leads to school lockdown
UPDATE: Link fixed.
In Other Words: Obstruction
Murray Waas has a new story out:
"The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas."
TPM has the analysis — the emails lead:
to the inescapable conclusion that the administration was complicit in attempts to cover up White House involvement in the firings.
***
So what documents are we talking about? The story deals with two separate letters that the Justice Department sent to Congress about the firings.
The first was a January 31 letter to Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK) assuring him that "not once" had the administration considered using the Patriot Act provision to install Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s former aide, as the U.S. attorney for Little Rock. The provision allowed the attorney general to appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely without Senate confirmation.
Of course, Kyle Sampson had been pushing to use the provision for months — and had communicated the plan to the White House.
But when it came time to answer questions about it, the White House signed off on a letter saying that they had never contemplated such a thing. And the withheld documents show that Christopher Oprison was the White House official who signed off on the letter — that’s funny because Kyle Sampson had layed out the plan to use the Patriot Act provision to appoint Griffin in an email to Oprison just a month before.
The second letter in the piece is a February 23rd letter to Congress that claimed that Karl Rove hadn’t had any role in appointing Griffin. Fittingly, Oprison also signed off on that one — even though Sampson had written him in an email in December that Griffin’s appointment was "important to Karl."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto tells Waas that "Chris did not recall Karl’s interest when he reviewed the letter."
But Fratto also says that "We have no record of that letter ever leaving the White House counsel’s office." In other words, they never bothered to ask Karl Rove or any one in his office to check whether the statement was true. And they just forgot that Sampson earlier had boasted about Rove’s interest. Huh.
UPDATE: Another bombshell — Gonzales reveals that Bush and Tony Snow lied about Bush’s role in the sacking of federal prosecutors.
Symphony Hall Violence
Man, those Boston Pops concerts really can get out of hand sometimes.
Bye, Blair
I actually liked him for a while. He had a decade of really great achievements, until he climbed aboard the Bush Bandwagon.
Star Explosions
A star about 150 times the mass of the sun has just exploded in a galaxy a mere 240 million light years away in what astronomers are calling the brightest and most powerful supernova explosion ever observed.
Okay, it didn’t "just" explode — it exploded 240 million years ago, but the light from the explosion is just reaching us now. But I digress…
It was first detected last September and is still going on, as opposed to most supernovae, which burn out after only a few days or possibly weeks. The estimated peak energy output of this thing is the equivalent of 50 billion suns.
A quarter billion light years is too far for any effect on us. It’s even too far for good pictures. But this particular event might be about to happen again right next door, a mere 7,500 light years away. A star named Eta Carinae is in the process of blowing up, and could experience a supernova literally tomorrow (or, actually, 7500 years ago). When Eta Carinae explodes, you’ll be able to see it during the day and read by it’s light at night. According to people do look at stuff like this for a living, “”Eta Carinae’s explosion could be the best star-show in the history of modern civilization.” Click here for a high resolution image of Eta Carinae, courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope and APOD.