Web Log Archive, August 12th through August 25th, 2007
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
"I
found myself being more and more involved with people who were rejected by
society - with, I'd say, drug addicts, alcoholism, battered this, battered that
- and I found an affinity there and I respected very much the honesty I found on
that level with people I met, because in hospices, for instance, when people are
dying they're much more open and more vulnerable, and much more real than other
people."
Diana, 1961-1997
Friday, August 24th, 2007
"It was monstrously painful. I was
burning like a torch. I don't know what I did to deserve this."
Reuters
"I
am more afraid of an army of 100 sheep led by a lion than an army of 100 lions led by a sheep."
"Speech has been given to man to disguise his
thoughts."
"Treason is a matter of dates."
"The only thing you cannot do with a bayonet is
sit on it."
Charles-Maurice
de Talleyrand, 1754-1838, Foreign Minister of Napoleon Bonaparte
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007
Today's
word is adamantine, an adjective derived
from the Latin word for diamond. Synonymous
with its shorter 
form (adamant), something or someone who is adamantine
is hard, stubborn, unyielding, inflexible...impenetrable.
At left is the best known photograph of the best known
piece of jewelry in the world: the beautiful Hope
Diamond which, by legend, began its journey to
France in the mid 1600's as a stolen Indian religious artifact. From 1668 until
the French revolution in 1792, it remained in the possession of the French
Monarchy and was, in fact, worn by Marie Antoinette. Its whereabouts after
the Revolution are unknown until the jewel reappeared in England
some twenty years later. There have been many spooky tales written about the 'curse' associated with its ownership. It is named after
Henry Hope, who
purchased it in 1839 from the estate of England's King George IV.
Except for an occasional tour, the blue stone, in its setting
as the pendant on a diamond necklace, has been on exhibit at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, DC since 1958.
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007
A
federally funded study published in The New England Journal of Medicine
finds that many older people are willing to do (and talk about)
intimate acts.After more than
thirty years as a news junkie, there's one (call it) 'category'
of story that still chills and fills me with awe: it's the category where a
person (or persons) go(es) missing (die(s), in fact) and friends and relatives
and authorities launch a great big search with lots of publicity and scary what-if
scenarios...only to discover that the individual being looked for was eerily
nearby ('under their noses')
the whole time and no one knew or thought to look in the 'right
place'. There's the (no less tragic for being the)
garden variety tale of kids getting stuck in a car
trunk (Web Log, 6/26/05) or an abandoned refrigerator or freezer. This
subcategory had, in fact, become SO common that new manufacturing
standards have been adopted in the last half-century to make it less likely to
happen...though it still (but rarely) does!
My nomination for the most bizarre such story goes
to the case of Mariesa Weber (Web
Log, 11/26/06), a thirty-eight year old woman thought missing from her
Florida home for almost two weeks before a family member (guided by a foul odor)
discovered that she had 1) fallen upside-down behind a bookcase in her
own bedroom, 2) become wedged against a wall and then 3)
quickly suffocated. She had been unable to breathe or to cry out!
But
the runner-up to Mariesa's sad circumstance must surely be the
case of Wade Steffey, a 19 year-old Freshman at Purdue University who was
last seen (alive) on the evening of January 13th of this year. Wade was
known to have left a fraternity party near his dormitory but, by the next
morning, it was clear that no one knew where he was! The case got national
attention from the likes of Nancy Grace and John Walsh but police could gather
no clues as to where the young man had gone. There was no apparent motive for
anyone to harm him although, of course, speculation abounded.
The
case remained mysterious for more than two months until midday, March 19th,
when a maintenance person was dispatched to check on a noise reported to be coming
from an electrical utility room serving a dormitory on the Purdue campus. Jeanne
Norberg, a spokesperson for the University, said that "the
utility room, roughly the size of a one-car garage, houses three electrical
transformers connected by high-voltage wires. Steffey's body was found behind
one of the transformers. The utility room has both an interior and exterior
door. When the maintenance person checked the room, she entered using the interior
door, which had been locked. During the subsequent investigation, police found
that the exterior door had been left unlocked." It
is thought that, perhaps inebriated but certainly confused, Mr.
Steffey, still unfamiliar with the campus and in search of an entrance to his
dormitory, had unwittingly entered the utility room via the unlocked outside
door. It is believed that, once in the dark room, he tripped over one or
more of the high voltage lines and, somehow, became a low-resistance path for
enough electrical current to kill him.
The Associated
Press reported this afternoon that Purdue University has agreed to pay
Wade's parents half a million dollars (the maximum claim that can
be made against a public institution in a wrongful death case under Indiana law)
for their loss. The University has admitted negligence in both 1) not
keeping the utility room adequately secured from unauthorized entry and 2)
not having proper signage at the doors to the room.
Monday, August 20th, 2007
Match Dot
Calm offers only three responses (not counting 'no
answer') to the question,
"How often do you drink?'.
The choices are 1) 'regularly',
2) 'social drinker, maybe one or two'
and 3) 'I don't drink alcohol'.
It should come as no surprise that almost every respondent chooses the second
answer.
So, some old crank commented on this in his 'Intro'.
[Ya know...the Intro's
where yer s'posed ta talk about how much you like to dress up (or
not)
and it's also where you can rattle on about your 'eclectic'
tastes (especially in music) and yer favorite colors
and how much you 'like to walk on the beach at
sunset' before 'spending
a quiet evening at home' with that 'special
someone'.]
Here's what the goat wrote:
"I
thought the very concept of a 'social drinker' went out with the hula
hoop. I'm suspicious of people who describe themselves as such. While I'm not,
in principle, opposed to alcohol (or other drugs), I've never met a person who
DID have a problem with alcohol who would admit it before they'd quit!"
Still
no word on whether the old grump has found Frances
Willard online.
"Everything
is not in the Temperance Reform, but the Temperance Reform should be in
everything."
FKW, (September 28th, 1839-February 17th, 1898)
Sunday, August 19th, 2007
Happy Birthday, Melissa!
It was April 15, 1994.
I can't find the
name of the interviewer. He was (is?) a representative of the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.
The interviewee is Dick Cheney, then a private citizen speaking to
criticism of how the first Gulf War ended under Bush the Elder, whom Cheney
served as Secretary of Defense:
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There
wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S.
occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us
in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government,
then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of
the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very
easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would
like to have to the west, part of it -- eastern Iraq -- the Iranians would
like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you've got
the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then
you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go
that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties. Everyone
was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties
as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families
-- it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of
whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort
to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
See
it for yourself!
Saturday, August 18th, 2007
"In
light of the recent attack from the enemies of God I ask the children of God to
go into action with Imprecatory
Prayer. Especially against Americans
United for Separation of Church and State. John Calvin gave the church its
marching orders from Scripture. The righteous have dominion, but only through imprecatory
prayer against the ungodly. Let us pray and see what our God will do!"
Pastor
Wiley Drake of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, California;
host of "The Wiley Drake Show",
heard Monday through Thursday at 9:00 am PST.
"...imprecatory prayer is mentioned in the Psalms when people called upon God to carry out punishment that they believed was God's to inflict." Sing Oldham, spokesperson for the Southern Baptist Convention.
Some examples of imprecatory prayer as offered by Pastor
Drake:
"Persecute them! Let them be put
to shame and perish."
"Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a
widow."
"Let his children be continually vagabonds, and
beg."
Transmutation: Silver Lining In a Lead Cloud
"A
lotta people like to say...ah, scaremonger about China, right? Lotta
politicians...ah, I think people should be careful what they wish for on China,
ya know? If China were to revalue its currency or if China is to start
making, say, toys that don't have lead in them or food that isn't poisonous,
their costs of production are going to go up and that means prices at Wal-mart
here in the United States are going to go up too. So I would say China is our
greatest friend right now. They're keeping prices low and they're keeping
prices for mortgages low, too!"
Erin Burnett, CNBC, 8/14/07
Thursday, August 16th,
2007 The Thirtieth Anniversary of
the Death of Elvis Presley
H
arlingen,
Texas is in Cameron County, whose southern border is the northern border of
Mexico. A healthy crow, flying in a straight line (without a passport), can make
it to Mexico from Harlingen in about a half hour. Crows have
been clocked at ~20 miles per hour (although they seldom fly in a straight line
and never carry papers). So, 'as the
crow flies', Harlingen is a mere ten miles from
Mexico (but somewhat longer by paved road). Spanish is the primary language of
Harlingen and its near-bys. A word like 'rye'
(as in 'rye bread') is likely
not to be understood...nor is 'muffin'...or
'pretzel'. Virtually
all local civic leaders have Spanish surnames, as do most of the
entries in the Irish
Sporting Green.
I arrived at the Harlingen Airport at ~8:30 AM after a one
hour flight from Houston, which is ~330 miles to the north. It was already
eighty-five degrees, up from the overnight low of seventy-nine but well below
the anticipated afternoon high of ninety-four.
I'd been up all night at Houston's William P. Hobby Airport, schmoozing
with Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers as they filed
in, beginning at ~3:30 AM, to prepare for passenger-screening rituals.
I
had assumed that 'food' would not and could not get any worse than what had passed over my teeth at the McDonald's
at LAX but I was wrong, of course. The Wendy's at the Hobby Airport
was well-steeled to outdo its Los Angeles rival. Although a mere
$3.50 (half the cost of the cat food I had eaten at the
McDonald's),
there was something reminiscent of cat litter about what Wendy's was calling
'breakfast' at this airport. And it is not to be imagined that even a starving
cat (or dog) could
be made to eat it! A
short, dark-haired, just-out-of-high-school-cashier robotically
fielded numbered (on an overhead menu) orders from
desperate, weary, screened & bleary captives in an extemporaneous queue. After logging in
and collecting for each entry, she heartily
expelled 'Next Guest!' into a cheap microphone on a
gooseneck stand mounted above the register. What were called 'eggs' could not be had without bacon or
sausage and 'toast' was not
among the
choices. Rather, it had to be a 'biscuit'. No butter, either...only
some kind of 'spread' (with the
consistency of
anti-squeal disc-brake lube...sans the nutty flavor). But the centerpiece of this culinary miscarriage was
something called 'hash browns', of which there were
too many.
I
later learned, as part of Sheriff
Tommy Thomas' campaign to deter local crime, that Wendy's has been awarded a
food-services contract at the Harris
County Jail.
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007
Roz
Chast, 2007
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
"If
you'd ever worked with Phil Rizzuto you'd know what it was like to work eighteen
years with a guy who never learned your first name."
Bill
White, former pitcher, broadcaster and National League President
"I
heard the doctors revived a man after he'd been dead for four-and-a-half
minutes. When they asked him what it was like being dead, he said it was like
listening to Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto during a rain delay."
David Letterman
"I
like radio better than television because if you make a mistake on radio,
nobody knows!"
Phil
Rizzuto, Yankee shortstop turned broadcaster (1917-2007),
who died this morning twelve years to the day after teammate, Mickey Mantle
Monday August 13th, 2007
"Capital
is only the fruit of labor and could not have existed if labor had not first
existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.
The citizens of the United States must control the mighty commercial forces
which they have called into being. The Constitution guarantees protections to
property, but it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. It is
necessary that laws be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds for
political purposes."
Theodore
Roosevelt, August 31, 1910
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Frustration
has not often been better represented than at Los Angeles International Airport
yesterday afternoon:
"It's becoming a logistical issue with diapers!"
Chris Cognac