The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Opinion

  • Superstitions

    Jenn and I were on vacation last week. We got back home last night at 2330, approximately 2 hours late.

    This is all Tom’s fault.

    We briefly stopped by Tom and Steph’s house because they happened to be near the airport and we had not seen them for a while. Tom asked whether we’d been experiencing any flight delays recently during our travels. I responded no, we hadn’t really, and any delays that were hitting us weren’t really important because we’ve been taking direct flights.

    At the time, I thought to myself, “Oh great. Tom said the “d” word, and we’re about due for our share of airport congestion after all the easy traveling we’ve had.” I remonstrated myself for that because, like saying “shutout” during a game, it’s all superstition with no effect on life (or the game), and our odds of experiencing delays don’t change because we’ve had a lucky streak. Dice have no memory.

    It’s still Tom’s fault, though.

  • L.Ron Hubbard to the RESCUE!

    Did you know that L.Ron Hubbard (why the ‘L’? Can’t I call him Ronny Hubbard?) created the first and only technology that allows people to truly study? Neither did I. Did you know that things are so simple that it’s merely the addition of mass to the current level of sigificance that allows one to study?

    Students of any age can run into this barrier. Let us say that little Johnny is having an awful time at school with his arithmetic. You find out that he had an arithmetic problem that involved apples, but he never had any apples on his desk to count. Get him some apples and give each one of them a number. Now he has a number of apples in front of him – there is no longer a theoretical number of apples.

    Wow. But wait, there’s better yet.

    When one hits too steep a gradient in studying a subject, a sort of confusion or reelingness (a state of mental swaying or unsteadiness) results. This is the second barrier to study.

    I wonder if you need to clear the word reelingness? If you read the linked page for How To Clear A Word, you will see that it advocates having a dictionary by your side while studying. So far so good, but it also advocates Clearing (understanding by looking up in the dictionary until full meaning is attained) every word in the definition of the original word you don’t quite understand, ad infinitum. This could go on for quite some time for a mildy complicated word.

    L.Ron is such a dope. I really wish his brand of psychobabble “theology” would go away. Maybe if I send them some money, they’ll clear out my thetans.

  • Why Today isn't the First Day of Summer

    For a while now, I’ve thought it somewhat silly that the first day of Summer falls on the solstice. This is the day where the Earth’s north pole is pointed as close to the sun as it will get, the sun will be the highest in the sky, and the northern hemisphere will receive more solar energy than any other day in the year. By all rights, this should be midsummer’s day.

    And in times past, it was! The Celtic holiday of Litha celebrates midsummer, and their are seven others (Lammas, Mabon, Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, and Beltane) marking eight equidistant spaces around the calendar. The longest day of the year is midsummer, and the shortest is Yule, i.e. midwinter. This just makes sense to me, I don’t know about you.

    Of course, I also feel (and here we’re getting into mere opinion and personal attestation) that the middle of summer weather is more deeply in July than in June. Likewise, the more wintery part of winter is about a month or so after December 22, previously noted as Yule/Midwinter (known in popular society now as the first day of winter). So, from personal experience, I’d place the mid-seasonal day about one month after the currently selected first-day-of-whatever. I’d place midsummer’s day around July 15, and mid-fall around Halloween (Samhain), midwinter near January 30, and midspring on May 1.1

    These are, of course, personal picks. For ease of use, I’d advocate going back to the Celtic calendar for seasonal variations and stop calling June 21 the first day of summer. It was bloody hot out yesterday, so why wasn’t it summer yet?

    1If it were a true weather geek, I’d graph this and pick some points using objective temperature data, but I’m not. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader

  • Plagiarism on the Net

    Anyone who blog posts in the fashion that I do is a plagiarist of some sort. Plagiarism in this case is defined as not citing your source information correctly. Now, keep in mind that my wife is a college professor of technical communication and has lectured me several times on the definition of plagiarism. Do not send me comments about how linking to the website is citation enough. If you paraphrase, quote, mention, or write anything that did not emerge fully formed from your own skull, you are supposed to cite your source. That is where we bloggers fail miserably, because we paraphrase all the time, with only a link-back to justify our actions.

    I am not going to change, however. We’re not publishing academically or professionally, and in that case, I believe that my citations are sufficient. There is, however, that breed of site that plagiarizes directly without any attempt to inform the reader that they are doing so.

    For example: My last post was about a biofuel alternative. I had two links in my feed reader to this one. I read the first one and found this entry at the bottom.

    Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    So I went to the UWM site and read the substantially same information. Then I went to the second site in my feed reader, Biopact.com. I found the same information, copied directly from the UWM press release, with absolutely no attempt to alert the reader that this was not written by Biopact. There is even a blockquoted paragraph halfway down, again copied directly from the press release, which would imply to the reader that here is text taken from elsewhere, rather than copied along with the rest of the article.

    This sort of activity gives everyone a bad name, and I call on Biopact to not do it. A quick blurb (see my post) followed by a link to the press release would be the acceptable format.

  • Going Overboard

    Insane Harry Potter fans now have a theme park to look forward to.

    I wil admit to being a huge Harry Potter fan, but not an insane one. Insane ones love ALL the movies and go to ALL of the HP-themed Dragon*Con sessions. And, of course, they’ll travel to California Florida to see a theme park.

  • His Jesus and Your Jesus

    A lot of my four readers are left-wing pinko commies. Thusly, they’ll probably get a kick out of John Scalzi’s1 What My Jesus Would Do post.

    I confess that I did not read the whole thing, because I didn’t think there would be many insights for me (because I agree with the premise), but I read, and was amused by, the bumper stickers.

    1(see last Evil Eyebrow post). No, I’m totally not trolling Scalzi’s blog this morning

  • Legalisms

    “What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?”
    “A good start”

    “Why won’t sharks eat lawyers?”
    “Professional courtesy”

    “Why are there so many lawyers in the United States?”
    “Because St. Patrick rid Ireland of all the snakes”

    I received an email today with the following disclaimer. I’m sure you’ve all seen it, or something very similar to it.

    This e-mail and any attachments are confidential. If you receive this message in error or are not the intended recipient, you should not retain, distribute, disclose or use any of this information and you should destroy the e-mail and any attachments or copies.

    I’m probably violating some legal code outside of copyright by reprinting it here, but these disclamiers bug the crap out of me. If you are so silly as to send something confidential to the wrong person, that’s just too bad. It isn’t my problem outside of my obligation not to do anything illegal. You have violated your own rules, so deal with it. Hasn’t Enron, Scooter Libby, or Alberto Gonzales taught you to keep sensitive material out of emails?

    I’ve seen numerous examples of these disclamiers ranging from, “Please alert us if you received this in error,” to three-paragraph dissertations about consequences and state codes. If you have any particular favorites laying around, by all means, put them in the comments.

  • Eric Rudolph is a Dolt

    Eric Rudolph, the convicted abortion clinic bomber and the perpetrator of the backpack bomb at the 1996 Olympics here in Atlanta, is sending out hate mail from prison.

    BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Victims of Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion extremist who pulled off a series of bombings across the South, say he is taunting them from deep within the nation’s most secure federal prison, and authorities say there is little they can do to stop him.

    I’m not sure why this is news. Here is a man who is obviously not on the same path as the majority of Americans, who will probably never be convinced that what he has done is evil, yet is protected by the First Amendment. He may write whatever the heck he wants, and having AP articles pop up about it is just media masturbation.

    What causes the title of this post is the supposition that a man, who will die in his cell, can “get back” at the families of his victims. To anyone who is angered or disturbed by this man’s writings, especially the victim’s families, I say: “He will never ever breathe a free breath of air again.” To Eric Rudolph I say: “You are a dolt, dude, who is in prison. Congratulations on your letters, though.”

  • Gas Station Price Fixing

    Does this make sense? Quoted from an AP article.

    Center City BP owner Raj Bhandari has been offering senior citizens a 2 cent per gallon price break and discount cards that let sports boosters pay 3 cents less per gallon.

    But the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin’s Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price.

    I’m surprised that this law is legal. I suppose it could be an effort (I’m guessing here) to keep big-chain gas stations from underpricing single-station owners and running them out of business, but the law seems to be at odds with a person involved with a civic undertaking, in this case.

  • Oh, the Irony. It Burns…

    NPR’s Morning Edition interviewed a woman today concerning the media coverage surrounding (enveloping? choking?) the Virginia Tech shootings. The upshot was, the media is being a huge hungry hound and is exacerbating the trauma on a number of students/faculty/staff/etc. The woman interviewed was a survivor of the Jonesboro shootings in 1998 when she was a 13 year old sixth grader. She spoke about how the media camped out for the remainder of the school year (March-June), not allowing the school any peace.

    NPR also taped some quick soundbites with current students at VT concerning their opinions that the media empire needed to pack up and go; their presence is not allowing VT to heal. The slant of the entire segment was “Media: thou art evil, now GO!”

    Of course this was on a radio news program. I wonder if the students being interviewed about the too-extensive media coverage appreciated the irony of their actions.

    NPR is not immune from the same budget factors that drive the ABC’s and CNN’s and Fox’s of the world. They, however, have a reputation for calm, unbiased, dispassionate objectivity which occassionally gets them into a sticky situation, like this one.

    The irony is hot, let’s go press some scenes.