(boing!) Cnoocy Mosque O'Witz

Hey, lumpybeast and I are going to go to the 8:00 showing of Angels and Demons at the Capitol tonight. Anybody want to come and mock with us?

I'm still reading Isidore's Etymologies off and on. Here he is defending the inaccuracies of previous authors in language that could apply to him:

Unde nec historicos nec commentatores varia dicentes imperite condemnare debemus, quia antiquitas ipsa creavit errorem.
Therefore we ought to rashly condemn neither historians nor commentators saying various things, because antiquity itself has created the error.
(XV.i.2.)

When I started reading Isidore, I wasn't expecting the amount of personal respect I've gained for him.

I don't have a PS3, XBOX360, or Wii, so I'm not in the market for the game itself. But man, I could watch the cinematic* all day.


(via Offworld)
* This is the pre-game movie that plays once you load the game until you hit the button to jump to the menu.

So there's a new study that finds that animals that look different from their fellows are less likely to get munched by predators. It's interesting enough, but I'm mainly posting because of the headline at LiveScience:

Freaks Survive Because They Are Strange

And don't you forget it!

via BoingBoing

1. Discovered that I could subscribe to the videos of Jay Smooth and Sarah Haskins as video podcasts and watch them on my iPod.
2. Got to move carts around in the delightfully creepy U-Haul facility on the Medford-Arlington-Somerville border.
3. Saw 4 movies: a vampire movie, a historical epic, a shiny space adventure, and a superhero story. Perhaps surprisingly, the vampire movie had the lowest body count and the least bleak outlook.

So, a pretty good weekend.

So yesterday we drove from Atkins all
the way to here, the hotel where we stayed
last Friday night. Assuming all goes well
(that is, New Jersey fails to eat us when
we pass through it again) tonight we're home.
I'll probably have more to say from there.

So now we're headed back to Arlington.
What did we do in Tennessee? Well, I
just hung around, spent time with lumpybeast,
her brother, mother, and their cat. The cat,
whose name is Daisy, is a sweetie-pie,
all white with big gray spots, who likes to climb
into a lap and purr. We got along.
The other major thing was lumpybeast
and mom's tattoos! For mom: a butterfly
in "sassy" stylized form, for beast: a star,
five-pointed, which is somewhat flowerlike.
(I'll post some pictures later if I can.)

So here it's Blank Verse Blog Week and I'm now
in Tennessee with lumpybeast. We had
some difficulty on our journey here;
we planned at first to get to Allentown
by Friday night, but we got started late
and in New Jersey we decided we
would find a place to sleep. But we did not
expect to tangle with Parsippany,
where going to the Days Inn from the mall
next door involves a fifteen-minute drive
to find some turning spots. And when we did
arrive they told us that they only had
a smoking room, and all the rooms we saw
were lacking windows. So we hit the road
again and headed Pennsylvania-wards.
Or so we thought. We went a ways and found
that we had no idea where we were.
So we got off and tried to find some place
where we could get directions. But we got
confused again and ended up at some
executive hotel where we found out
that we had sleepily confused our east
and west. But Jersey wasn't finished yet.
The westward ramp onto the interstate
was closed so we took detours all around
to find the path to take us out of state.
We counted mileposts down to twelve, and then
New Jersey had a final trick to throw.
We hit a spot of road construction, where
the speed went down to nothing. Half an hour
or something later we were out. A little drive
and we arrived outside of Allentown,
and checked into a nice hotel attached
by secret stairway to the furthest north
of all the Waffle Houses in the world.
(Hooray!) The other days were easier
except for storms in Eastern Tennessee.

And now we're at Panera posting this.

Just to remind y'all: Blank Verse Blog Week starts this Sunday! I'll be away for pretty much all of it, which actually may mean I have more time for posting than usual. We'll have to see.


Verse FAQ
Prose FAQ

ETA: corrected stupid typo in title

Congrats to Vermont for legalizing same-sex marriage!
What I could figure out with a quick check:
Text of the bill.
It goes into effect on September 1, 2009. A while to wait for Vermonters, but early Vermont September should produce some beautiful wedding photos.

Longevity prospects: Excellent. The Vermont constitution is really hard to amend, and cannot be amended by citizen initiative:

The Vermont General Assembly has the sole power to propose amendments to the Constitution of Vermont. An amendment must originate in the Senate, where it must receive a two-thirds vote. After passing the Senate, it must also receive a majority vote in the House. Any amendment that passes both Houses, must be repassed by majority votes, after a newly elected legislature is seated; again, first in the Senate, then in the House. The proposed amendment must then be passed by a majority of the state's voters at a referendum. Only every other Senate session may initiate the amendment process. Thus, Senates elected in off-year (i.e. non-Presidential) elections may initiate amendments, but not Senates elected during Presidential elections. (Vermont Constitution, Chapter 2, Section 72)

(From Wikipedia, but http://www.vermont-archives.org/govhistory/governance/Constitution/amending.html agrees.)
So the anti-marriage groups would need a significant legislative turnaround in both houses to repeal this.

Hi! I just wanted to point out the very readable summary of today's ruling from Iowa, especially pages 4-6 (of 6), where the court addresses the government's arguments in favor of a ban on same-sex marriage. Many of them take the form "whether or not X is a worthwhile goal, there's no evidence that excluding gays and lesbians from civil marriage would help X."

I've been keeping track of the discussion that is being called RaceFail09 on rydra_wong's lj. I don't have anything really deep to say about it, because I am very much reading and learning. But I do want to say this:

Publicizing any personal details, including their legal name, about someone who has requested that those details stay private is horrendously offensive and not to be easily forgiven. And you cannot make the argument that your target justified your behavior by saying bad things about your real name in public if you chose to participate in a discussion under your real name. You both brought a persona to the table, and each of you made the choice what data to link to that persona.

A small octopus at the Santa Monica Pier aquarium disassembled the recycling system valve at the top of her tank and flooded the building with 200 gallons of seawater.

The tiny octopus, which is about the size of a human forearm when its appendages are extended, floated lazily in the water that remained in its tank.

It watched intently through glass walls and portholes as workers struggled to dry the place out in time for the day's first busload of schoolchildren to arrive on a 9:30 a.m. field trip.

The only significant damage was to new flooring in some offices.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-octopus27-2009feb27,0,3764268.story

WETA Workshops (the LoTR folks) built a beautiful and functional mermaid tail for a swimmer, Nadya Vessey, who lost both legs below the knee as a child.
http://www.wetanz.com/a-mermaid-s-tale/
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4858855a11.html
The Stuff article talks about her "frolic[ing] in the harbour". A little posthuman, but definitely neat.

ETA: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4203291a6442.html has more from Ms. Vessey's point of view.

via jwz

Scientists discover first-ever single-element ionic crystal. It is made entirely of boron.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128215130.htm

If any of you have Macs with a working Classic mode, can I make a copy of your OS 9 System Folder?

We live in the future. There are changes in politics, technology, and culture that were relegated to the far future in science fiction stories half a century ago. And yet, whenever people think about the future, many say, "if we live in the future, where are the flying cars?"

We live in the future.
(via Boing Boing)

I wonder if artificial chicken flavor has the same sort of mild medicinal connotation for cats that artificial mint flavor does for humans.

I'm not a hardcore gamer. I'm an enthusiastic player of pencil-and-paper role-playing games, but I've probably played or run less that a dozen different systems. I like computer role-playing games, but generally only when played as a group, with multiple people in the same room. One thing I have never been able to get into is online role-playing games. I've had accounts on LambdaMOO and Second Life, but I haven't really done anything with them. It's the talking to strangers that does it, I think. I'm not good at striking up a conversation, especially if I don't have any information about the person. (Though I am only marginally better at doing this in person.) So instead of getting into World of Warcraft and EverQuest over the last few years, I've continued playing Dungeons and Dragons.

You know how a lot of people have been reading the 4th edition rules and saying "this makes me want to get out my dice and play again"? I had that reaction years ago with 3rd edition. And I've been playing since. I've been playing with friends while, it seems, all the famous people have been abandoning pencil and paper to do their gaming online. I don't have a problem with that. I think it's great that there's this new type of gaming developing. But it does mean that while a lot of people see the elements from World of Warcraft in 4th edition as two great tastes that taste great together, to me it looks like they're changing the formula for Coke so that it tastes more like Pepsi.

Note: This was set off by Eric Burns's post on the subject, though I don't have a disagreement other than personal preference with what he says there.

Many of you have invited me to cool things around Boston this weekend. I'm not ignoring the invitations out of rudeness, but because I'm going to Philadelphia this weekend.