The excellent Dawn points our attention to a column by Rick Reilly* on the lack of attention to women's achievements in sports and a call to vigilance for Title IX.
*Also the author of the excellent sports novel Slo Mo! My Untrue Story.
From Washington State Vital Statistics 2001, the top ten baby names in the state in 2001:
girls:
Emily
Madison
Hannah
Emma
Grace
Olivia
Elizabeth
Samantha
Sarah
Ashley
boys:
Jacob
Joshua
Ethan
Michael
Andrew
Alexander
Daniel
Nicholas
Tyler
Matthew
The list in the book, from the Department of Health, lists the top 100, with percentages and raw numbers. The odder names are further down the list, with some broken up by different spellings. Well, I say odd perhaps only because I don't watch soap operas.
Today's book of the day is "Diaper Free! The Gentle Wisdom of Natural Infant Hygiene" by Ingrid Bauer. Yes, it's chock full of "wisdom" on how to hold your baby over a receptacle when your intuition alerts you to their need to eliminate. Lavishly illustrated with black and white photos of white people with dreadlocks, tattoos or organic cotton clothing bonding with their widdling babies, holding them over toilets, mixing bowls, or the great outdoors.
Seen today, on the back of a pickup truck, a sticker shaped like those tree air-fresheners, but with a stars and stripes pattern. I'm stumped. Is it supposed to indicate patriotism with a piney fresh scent? But it's not actually scented, cause it's a sticker.
Sometimes this blog is for you, my loyal readers, but much of the time it's just for me. Here's a list of library blogs I wish to peruse later this week. People who write blogs that have crazy fans instead of loyal readers sometimes get lavish gifts. If any of you is even slightly crazy, please send me a working scanner. I'll post all sorts of crazy shit from my vast collection of thrifted cookbooks.
(OK, my scanner works, it just has a strange band of color distortion partway down every image. It was free with my computer.)
Oh wow, man. This blog should keep me happy for the rest of the night. Tardblog. Memepool totally rocks.
And may I add (later) that the tardfaq totally sums up my job, too. I love my job, but if I didn't make fun of some of my patrons and co-workers in my off time, I would totally lose it. But I won't be making a blog of it- my blog is how I escape... whee!
"The lion is a deadly, wild beast. Hey, why don't you stick your hand in her mouth?" Lots of good quotes in this one. I think my favorite right now is "The limb was not recovered because other lions pounced on it."
Apologies to both our loyal readers for the lack of new content lately. Family illness and a slow news season have interfered with keeping up. Speaking of the State of the Union et al., I wonder (he asked, semi-rhetorically) if people actually in the nuclear industry are any more or less likely to mispronounce "nuclear." Based on my observations (including the Bush dynasty), people associated with the CIA are far more likely to say "nucular" and do not take well to correction (no, I've never tried to correct a Bush).
So, of course, on the night that there's an internet-wide (as far as I've heard) Denial of Service attack underway, I have the midnight to eight on-call shift. Yawn.
Apparently, extremely dire things are happening in Hong Kong. This is from my usual source of things that leave me speechless. Check out the schematics, though.
Why, it looks as though Hugh Laurie, brilliant comedian and author, may be modelling corsets in Seattle.
Noted futurist Dan Bern will no doubt be pleased to see that his prediction is coming true. As soon as they realize that putting barcodes on babies isn't early enough to prevent all mix-ups, I have no doubt they'll start putting them on fetuses in utero.
In a ruling that appears to me to call into question the common-carrier status of ISPs, Verizon has been ordered to reveal the identify of one of their customers who downloaded 600 songs in a day. They are not doing so immediately, pending appeal. The DMCA is a ridiculously over-reaching piece of legislation that accomplishes no public good.
"'We're starting our decent now, buckle up. It's gunna' get bumpy,' he yelled over the defining engines."
It turns out that the youth of today don't read enough to write well. They're pretty much just writing phonetically at this point.
There's nothing like googling yourself and finding a page full of how you feel about reproduction at the moment. Or even how you felt about it a couple months ago. Not like I wasn't signing up for exposure by agreeing to be the poster-boy, but it's still a little unnerving. Also, for the record, despite the fact that the oral version is what got all the play, I was actually more recently involved in a trial of this.
An interesting (and stomach-turning) article on Minnesota garbage houses posits that people who end up creating a garbage house are a symptom of people not coping well with information overload and the rush of modernity. Personally, I suspect that garbage housers, like cat collectors and pack rats (the article makes a distinction, I don't know how much of one there is, besides the existence of paths in the chaos and the theme of the obsession) are the dysfunctional height of an inclination in a lot of people. Like severe depression or alcoholism, I think there are many (not all) people with the potential who don't actually end up developing the disease. Who knows what pushes you over the edge, but many people live careful lives to avoid a genetic curse.
Hey, look! Someone else already did the related web searching I was going to do after posting this- I'm going to go read it now.
Internationally famous science journal The Stranger investigates the cultural effects of drinking huge quantities of liquor. The results are amusing.
The Chinese place near my work provides a wonderful Dim Sum magic decoder ring (in addition to their wonderful Dim Sum).
Now that we're getting regularly crawled by Google, we're getting a few more hits than we probably used to. A thing that I found surprising is that almost all of the Google-generated hits go to Saint Sarah.
Update: Ever since the weekend of the 403, we've largely dropped off Google's map in searches for our patron saint, so I'm thinking maybe this sort of attempt to drive traffic by internal linkage isn't helpful.
OK, I'm going to play hooky from work and go to London. I will be bringing this map. Just tell my boss that I'm sick with the 2 week can't answer the phone flu.
This is interesting- take a peek into the nation's radio waves and a sample of a proprietary data service. It's playlists playlists and charts.
Is it the backwards masking for the new generation? A Washington couple claims that a voice is repeating the phrase "I hate you" under the sound of ocean waves on their baby's soothing sounds lulling-device from Wal-Mart. The mother suspects the fiendish Chinese.
As usual, I suspect they are loons.
Tony Blair describes the stabbing of a police officer as "wicked in the extreme." I'm betting he doesn't mean that in the sense of "excellent."
He asked for videos on routers. I started looking, and then he said "I don't mean to offend you, but routers are woodworking tools." I said "yes, I'm looking for the videos now." I did not say "Yeah, I figured that, since you don't look bright enough to operate any other kind of router."
The US military has launched an email infowar/propaganda effort aimed at senior officials in Iraq. The email is reported to contain a guide to defecting, and urges officials to turn weapons secrets over to the US.
Writer's Embellishment Assignment: write an email propaganda message of your own, to the officials of your choice. I'm betting you can do better. Would you write an emotional appeal? A highly-reasoned argument? Social engineering? Threats? Poetry?
While looking through the library catalog, I came across the subject heading "Machines a pain." Turns out it's a Canadian book on bread machine recipes, with (probably vendor-provided) bilingual cataloging. Which means that if you're looking for books on pain, you may find books on pain. In similar news, Montrealers have a cool name for ATMs.
"Flying Saucers for Everybody!" The past promise of the future, courtesy of Mechanix Illustrated and Popular Mechanics.
While looking for something else in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
To throw a sprat to catch a mackerel: To give a trifle or make a concession, in the hope of a bigger return.
A few easily choked children and elderly persons have led to the recall of the delicious conjac gel candy! Dammit! Now I will have to smuggle it over the border from Canada. Wait a minute, you didn't hear me say that.
"The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead."
Here's a few more ways to die.
Either 90 percent of the public are fuckin' retards, or I'm in a bad mood today.
In retarded news from Tennessee, people are stupid or possibly just cruel. But note entertaining use of "Y'all" in a serious news story.
Basic Hip Digital Oddio looks like a good complement to Cool and Strange Music Magazine (one of my favorites!).
I'm looking for more information on the Five Flavors in Asian culture, as linked to the five elements, internal organs, colors, etc. Here's a (sorta) informative look at the Five Flavors in Korean cookery.
First, a book set in the present, now Wm. Gibson is on the net. Today is officially the future.
The first test case of the MPAA's desire to keep you from watching content that you have legally purchased has ended, and the MPAA lost. Who knows if the precedent will be meaningful here in the Secure Homeland, where that sort of activity is tantamount to terrorism, but it's pleasing to know there's some justice somewhere.
Do you like surplus sales? Sure, we all do! I don't really like ones that are scheduled only when I'm working, though.
As suspected, the Friendly Persuasion radio show is gone. Take a look at host Otis F. Odder's web page for his new projects, including a song-a-day project with songs you may have heard on his show.
One-minute audio vacations you can take from your desk. Man, that sounds good right now.
This guy seems to have the kind of job I would have if I had gone a different direction in life. He also likes foreign groceries, though he may like the packaging exclusively, while I enjoy the contents, too.
In more best-of news, Yahoo UK has issued its Web picks of 2002. I haven't gone over the entire list, but it looks really good. The inclusion of Rather Good (home of those those kittens and other bizarre stuff. Requires Flash, but (and keep in mind who's telling you this) it's well worth it. Also requires significant bandwidth and/or patience) bodes great good for the list as a whole.
"Scientists" (which actually seems to mean "a life coach") have figured out a simple equation to answer that ages-old question: How happy am I? I got a 61. I kind of thought I was happier than that.
From today's book of the day, Frightening the Horses: Gay Icons of the Cinema by Eric Braun:
"Oscar Wilde's association with mainstream cinema dates back to 1923, when the most flamboyant of all Hollywood's silent female stars, Alla Nazimova, directed, under the name of her husband, Charles Bryant, an all gay/lesbian verson of Salome. It seems that not only were all the cast homosexual, but also the crew. It was the first production after Nazimova left Metro, the studio at which all her films since 1916 had been made."
The costumes were designed by Nazimova's lover, Natasha Rambova- Rudolph Valentino's wife!
Check it out: Rhino Handmade sells boutique CDs- short runs of that stuff you've been looking for forever, including Dan Hicks' It Happened One Bite!
Scroll about 2/3rds of the way down this story on American values, and click to enlarge the map of colored blobs- it's a map of where different countries fall on axes of traditional versus secular-rational values and survival versus self-expression values. It's a fascinating way to group ways of thinking, based on a particular way of looking at the development of nations.