Hehehe, okay, this is just too damn amusing for words. I despise zoning restrictions, especially the sanctimonious ones on porn shops and adult entertainment. So, I love that Berkeley California is considering trying to regulate military recruiters like many places regulate porn shops and adult toy stores. What is good for the goose, is good for the gander… if one place can regulate something it finds “offensive”, then so should another be able to.

The only place I’ve seen that debates this on anything like the merits, is over at the Volokh conspiracy. Most of the places pitching fits treat it as a given that Military and Porn aren’t the same, without explicitly going into the “why”. I’m pulling out a big bag of popcorn on this one.

Kung Fu Harley

Originally uploaded by The_Gut.

My feathered doofus got out sometime today.

It appears I left his food door open this morning. Though it doesn’t look like he got out until very late in the day. The damage was minimal – a few papers shredded, and the arm of my office chair destroyed. Luckily he didn’t hurt my other birds, nor damage anything particularly valuable. He appears fine, though I’ll keep a sharp eye on him the next day or two.

In case I didn’t leave his food door open, I’ve moved the two expensive chairs to a spare bedroom. I’ll scatter a couple of wadded up newspapers on the floor around his cage as distractions, and make sure a cardboard box is within sight. My dad lives only 200 feet away, so I’ll ask him to check in on Harley a couple of times tomorrow.

I’m pretty sure I left his food door open though. I had the strongest urge several times yesterday to either run in home during lunch to check on things, or to call my dad and ask him to come out and look things over. I figure my subconscious knew I hadn’t closed that door good and was trying to warn me. I didn’t listen to it though (I will next time).

This is the second time in the past year he’s gotten out, and he’s not an escape artist.

Middle-Aged Misery Spans Globe, Study Says

Using data on two million people from 80 countries, researchers found an extraordinarily consistent pattern in depression and happiness levels that leaves us most miserable in middle age.

Using a sample of one million people from the U.K., researchers discovered that for both men and women the probability of depression peaks around 44 years of age.

The only country which recorded a significant gender difference was in the U.S., where unhappiness reached a peak at around 40 for women and 50 for men.

/Sigh

The more interesting aspect of the individual worlds, is how widespread their influence can be. Take J.K Rowling – her sphere of influence is huge, and has impacted many, many of these Parallel worlds. Even more interesting, these worlds gravity’s can influence others long after the first has ceased to exist. For example, a jewish carpenter had an idea whose influence still impacts billions a couple of thousand years after his life.

This movie isn’t a bad documentary, but, its not authentic.

As an FYI, its a documentary about the small town south. And about how weird it can be.

Its kind of like Jim White. He says at the beginning that he can’t ever become a true southerner, though it appears that he grew up here. He can, he says, become a imitation southerner. Thats what this documentary is, its a imitation documentary, about an imitation south.

I’ve grown up in the South. Yet, I’m not a part of it. My world doesn’t intersect much with it. I’m fascinated by it, but I just don’t “get it”.

The South is the greatest place in the world to live. Its also a pestilent hellhole of a place to live. These are not contradictory things. Thats something Granola has never been able to comprehend. She cannot see how something can be horrible, and great at the exact same time. That is a incredibly severe limitation of her world view.

A good song almost always has to tell a story. I like very, very few songs that don’t tell a story. Though, on occassion, a catchy song will worm its way into my affections for a time.This is an example of a good song

Ballad of Lonnie Wolf
Shot himself at the trailer park
Couple of hours before it got dark
He did not die, he’s paralyzed
Can’t even wipe the tears from his eyes
He was playing harp, a lonesome tune
That drove everyone from the room
Pulled his gun from beneath the pillow
He put the barrel up against his temple
Oh Lonnie, you made a big mistake
Now he’s in the V.A. hospital
A victim of life’s ancient riddle
Tried to die, but he was codemned to live
Death’s a gift only God can give
Blink an eye, squeeze a hand
Life stretches out like the desert sand
He got in a hurry, couldn’t wait
Lonnie’s character sealed his fate
Oh Lonnie, you made a big mistake
Little girl in the next room
She’ll be a grown up pretty soon
In her heart there’s a broken place
Shattered just like her daddy’s face
Big Mistake© Johnny Dowd 

This is a keeper. I always wondered if this would really happen.

Just so you know – a good way to free someone caught like this would be to pour cold water down the flagpole, just above their tongue.

Indiana Boys Left With Bleeding Tongues After Licking Flagpole

Saturday , January 26, 2008

CHESTERTON, Ind. —

Two fourth-grade boys mimicking a scene from the movie “A Christmas Story” wound up with their tongues stuck to a frozen flagpole.
Gavin Dempsey and James Alexander were serving on flag duty at Jackson Elementary School Friday morning, with the job of raising and lowering the school’s flags. They decided to see if their tongues really would stick to the cold metal.

“I decided to try it because I thought all of the TV shows were lies, but turns out I was wrong,” Gavin said.

Karen Alexander, James’ mother , said her son told her he got the idea from the movie, which is based on stories about a boy growing up in the northwest Indiana community of Hammond in the 1940s.

“I can’t believe he did it, but they learned their lesson,” she said.

James said he plans to eat a lot of ice cream to help nurse his wound.

“When you’re young, you’re just messing around,” he said.

Billie Dempsey, Gavin’s mom, said a nurse called them to tell them the boys’ tongues were bleeding.

“The nurse asked them, ‘OK, who double-dog dared who?”‘ Billie Dempsey said, a reference to a phrase that a character in the movie used to dare another child to stick his tongue to the pole.

Blatantly copied, in clear violation of copyright, from fox news.

They exist. Its not just a science fiction thing. Every person on the planet lives in their own, individual one. Nobody lives in the same world as anyone else.

Take two people. Lock them into a 10 by 10 foot room, pure white. Leave them there for a week, just providing food, water at the same time each day. They still inhabit different worlds. One might be looking at a different wall at any given point in time. One will blink when the other one doesn’t. One will remember something different.

I don’t think that you can divide the self, and thus the world, from the senses. Look at Helen Keller. She was missing the two “most important” senses, yet had an agile, active mind, that wasn’t stifled by this lack. While many of her thoughts and ideas were misguided, or flat out wrong (she was a major proponent of socialism) this didn’t stem from her missing senses. But, how much could she have developed lacking all senses? Interesting question. I wonder what could be done with someone who lacked all sensory awareness, or whether they would even be sane? I would imagine that modern science could devise some way of stimulating the brain, and thus perhaps establishing communication. Hmm, but this is a major digression.

These individual worlds can interact, to a degree. Picture it as gravity. Start with a flat rubber sheet, stretched tight. Now, take a ball, and place it on the sheet. It deforms the sheet around itself, by creating a depression. Now, picture a thousand balls all rolling around this sheet, each deforming it to various degree’s. Now, here is where the picture changes from this model of standard gravity. With people, this deformation, this gravity, varies in how strong it is on each and every other person around. One of these person-world-balls rolls by 4 inches from another of the person-world-balls, and doesn’t deflect at all, despite rolling right through the other depression. For this person, the other person barely exists. Another person-world-ball rolls by 4 inches from that same person-world-ball and gets sucked right down to it, and they roll together for 4-5-6 years. That gravity was strong, and they were lovers. (Side note: They were not in love. Love doesn’t end. If you are involved with someone, and later you break up, then you were never in love. Love is permanent. This is a pet peeve of mine).

I’ll ponder more on this later. Its pretty much how I’ve always viewed the universe.

Well, I spent a goodly sum of money on Harley Macaw. His weight had been fluctuating a bit more than I liked. Also, he had been acting just a touch off. So, I carried him in to the vet for a fecal and bloodwork. This cost me a fair chunk of change (triple digits). Its always expensive to carry a bird to the vet. I figured out that evening what the problem was – but I digress slightly. Today I talked to the vet and Harley’s results were “excellent”.

So what was his problem? I had moved his cage to the center of the living room. He couldn’t perch close to the wall for the night, and didn’t feel protected. So it affected his behavior enough for me to notice.

In short – always go over your birds environment before resorting to the vet.

Not that the vet trip was wasted, it wasn’t. That info will go in Harley’s vet file and might prove useful later on.

Well I watched my first training session tonight, and was impressed. While extremely expensive, I can see the benefits. I can also see how it would suck in a fight for the vast majority of the people out there. It would require years of study to get the moves ingrained into muscle memory to make it instinctive in a fight.

This might be something for me.

I’ll buy this. My two favorites by far are at the top.

Yeah, they are late. However, I wasn’t feeling too well around New Year’s, and I’ve been giving this some thought. Especially since none of my New Year’s resolutions from last year were fulfilled.

So here we go.

1) To run a gaming campaign to the full finish. Or at least several adventures, and multiple levels.

2) To learn Latin – or at least make serious progress on learning it.

3) To find a semi social or better way of improving my physical health.

I’ve got three areas that I want to improve in this year. Mental, Physical, and Social.

The Gaming Campaign – thats three interesting folks right there, to get to know better. Plus, being the game master, it means I can explore a bit of acting. This is a “weak social” goal. In all the years of “gaming” we’ve done, I have actually ran very, very few adventures. Thats not fair to Johnny, Matt, or Kristan. This will also help a bit with the mental improvement goal. It will give me a chance to stretch my creativity.

Latin. I’ve got a tiny latin background. I’ve taken a class in it. I did badly, if I remember right. But latin is fascinating, and it will really help my mental acuity. I used to be smart, and I want to recapture that. One of my cousin’s – a favorite, once said I was the smartest person she had ever met. (And coming from her, thats a compliment.) When my house was being built, one of the guys who did something on it, was someone who I had gone to school with. I barely remembered him, and he barely remembered me. But we did recognize me. After I left, he told my dad, and the rest of his crew that the only thing he really remembered about me from High School, was that I was “scary smart”. I want to get back to some of that. I’ve squandered whatever excess intellect I once had. (And, I’m vain. There are only two people (in my daily life) I’ll unreservedly say are smarter than me. Jigsawdiva, and my boss.

Physical Health. I’m going to try Kung Fu.

More on these later.