pointed theses bags out… I bet would dig one. 🙂

Maybe a nifty giftie for my sweetie, too.

Good morning! I’ve been up for a few hours, synching my schedule with my sweetie’s… I don’t remember my dreams beyond the song “doing the pigeon”, watching cartoons and snuggling on an airplane headed somewhere…it was over water and we were both very groggy.

Round 1 is over as of August, but I found a duck has been so popular another round is in the works. 500 plastic ducks start in London and race around the world in the biggest plastic duck race on Earth. If you find one of the little darlings, make note of its progress and see that it gets to another distant destination safely. (Now if airport personnel ask if anyone’s given you anything, you can say, “Just this duck.”)

I’m sort of curious… do the McDonalds not in South Florida carry the weird new ‘Hispanic Menu’ ?

I went by one last night, and they had on the menu (and great big signage…) Cuban sandwiches, something called a ‘Latin McOmelet’ sandwich, pineapple-mango dipping sauce for chicken nugs, and a ‘Dulce de Leche’ Flurry thing.

Too Drunk For Murder
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A suburban man charged in a shooting spree that left two dead and 16 others wounded in an Elgin nightclub might argue he was too drunk to be legally responsible for the gunfire.

Horse/Human Orgy
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Tempe police say six horses, including a 4-month-old colt, were sexually molested inside a Tempe stable over a period of two months.

Bloodsuckers
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Generous North Americans who gave more than half a billion dollars (U.S.) to the Red Cross expected their donations would go directly to surviving family members and victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But in a growing scandal which threatens to rock the foundation of the 120-year-old American Red Cross, it now appears that of the $530 million (U.S.) total donated, more than $200 million is being diverted to the blood agency’s long-term goals and administrative costs.

escheat (es-CHEET) noun

1. The reversion of property to the state or crown in case of no legal heirs.

2. Property that has reverted to the state or crown.

verb tr. and intr.

To revert or cause to revert property.

[From Middle English eschete, from Old French eschete, from Vulgar Latin excadere, from Latin ex- + cadere (to fall).]

diablerie (dee-AHB-luh-ree; -AB-), noun:
1. Sorcery; black magic; witchcraft.

2. Representation of devils or demons in words or pictures.

3. Mischievous conduct; deviltry.

She invariably had every child in the establishment at her heels, open-mouthed with admiration and wonder,–not excepting Miss Eva, who appeared to be fascinated by her wild diablerie, as a dove is sometimes charmed by a glittering serpent.
–Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Diablerie comes from the French, from diable, devil, from Latin diabolus, from Greek diabolos, “slanderer,” from diaballein, “to slander,” literally “to throw across,” from dia-, “across” + ballein, “to throw.”

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

ABC 10 Oct 30 08:00pm
Special/Family, 30 Mins.
Linus waits in the pumpkin patch for the elusive Halloween symbol to appear.

I’m listening to Gregorian monks while I code. (Thank goodness some non-spyware net radio stations are still functional! 🙂 ) It somehow seems rather appropriate. I can just imagine a group of monks up until all hours of the night trying to get the gospels to be just right in song so that the information will parse correctly. Will HTML, VB or Visual C be considered art 700 years from now?

*note to self, bring dsl modem back to the house, this dialup from home is sooooo sloooow.

arcanum ar-KAY-nuhm, noun;
plural arcana -nuh:

1. A secret; a mystery.

2. Specialized or mysterious knowledge, language, or information that is not accessible to the average person (generally used in the plural).

Arcanum is from the Latin, from arcanus “closed, secret,” from arca, “chest, box,” from arcere, “to shut in.”

debridement di-BREED-ment, day-noun

Surgical removal of dead, infected tissue or foreign matter from a wound.

From French debridement, from debrider (to unbridle), from Middle French desbrider (de- + brider).

Watching ‘Network’ on the tube.

some great, evil quotes in that.

“It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature! And you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21 inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”

“The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivaried, multinational dominion of dollars!”

Mr. Jensen: The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock — all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Howard Beale: Why me?

Mr. Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Mr. Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

I’m listening to Gregorian monks while I code. (Thank goodness some non-spyware net radio stations are still functional! 🙂 ) It somehow seems rather appropriate. I can just imagine a group of monks up until all hours of the night trying to get the gospels to be just right in song so that the information will parse correctly. Will HTML and C++ be considered art 700 years from now?

*note to self, bring dsl modem back to the house, this dialup form home is sooooo sloooow.

benison BEN-uh-suhn; -zuhn, noun:
Blessing; benediction.

Benison comes from Old French beneison, from Latin benedictio, from benedicere, “to bless,” from bene, “well” + dicere, “to say.”

Every moment spent with my love is a benison, exhilarating and heartwarming each step of the way.

The infamous “fast server cookie not sticking” bug is finally fixed. Basically, the history was like this:

— it worked
— moved code around and broke it
— fixed it in CVS
— fixed it manually on the site
— clobbered it on the site
— (still fixed in CVS)
— updated back from CVS, so it’s fixed again, for good.

Check that you’re hitting sheila or gerald. If not, go login again.

Superior! Quien es mas Macho? is a two-player card game
using an ordinary deck of playing cards. Although not necessary, it
is fun to think of the card game as being a wrestling match — the
cards are the various maneuvers each wrestler performs and the suits
represent “styles” of wrestling (Clubs= Martial Arts & Brawling,
Spades= Throws, Power Moves & Grappling, Diamonds= Acrobatics and
Jumping, Hearts= “Personality” moves such as appealing to the crows,
cheating, posing and posturing).

You know you want to play.

Basic cruelty by those in power seems to be an element of human design. (Fortunately I’ve encountered a few exceptions.)

In ‘The Glass Teat’ Harlan Ellison recounts a story he says he got from Mattel insiders involved in product testing. A doll was made that upped the ante on the usual wetting and crying, making the reactions a bit more interactive. When rocked gently or given a bottle it would gurgle and coo, but when treated roughly or spanked it would cry.

The test children quickly learned which stimulus would provide which reaction, and also quickly decided which was more fun. Soon the only response coming from the dolls were cries as the children found new ways to trigger them.

Apocryphal, I know, but consistent with what I’ve seen.

Yes, you don’t often see little girls torturing their dollies, but those dollies don’t cry. There’s something about a victim begging for mercy that seems to throw some malignant switch in homo sapiens.

It reminds me a little of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A good overview with pictures and some short video is here.

Briefly, in order to study some aspects of prisons volunteers agreed to play guards and prisoners for at $15 a day for 1-2 weeks. A hallway and some small rooms in the Psych building were made into a “prison” with CCTV monitoring. The students were arbitrarily divided into two groups by a flip of the coin. Half were randomly assigned to be guards, the other to be prisoners.

“Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.”

I dreamed of being in a caravan travelling a great wilderness trail, down a tree-covered mountain pass. As we continued our descent, the sky opened up again, brisk and autumnal, almost seeming more broad than the horizon could hold…

The plain below, compared to the mountains, seemed level as a lake.

The wind made strokes across it, as if drawing poems in a calligraphy of curves and lines on a vast canvas of green…

No wildlife on the ground was visible at this distance, but I could feel the area was vibrant with activity just beyond the scope of my sight.