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Warning: This has been migrated from an earlier blog server. Links, images, and styles from postings before 2018 may be funky.

26 Nov 2009 — Sit! Stay! Do your homework!

According to the New York Times, my indispensible source of yuppie trends, some parents have adapted the techniques of Cesar “The Dog Whisperer” Milan to train their own children to obey them.

15 Nov 2009 — All of this has been sung before and it all will be sung again

After I first heard the Philadelphia Chickens CD, I went around telling friends and acquaintances, “There’s this Sandra Boynton CD with a song called ‘Belly Button’, and it’s a round! Get it? Belly button? Round? Isn’t that great?”

04 Nov 2009 — We are of mediocre screenwriting. Always.

I have certain warm fuzzy feelings—in my reptilian hindbrain, you might say—for the original V miniseries, and I figured it would be a refreshing change to watch a new TV show when it is broadcast instead of waiting a few years for the DVDs to arrive. So I saw the first episode of the remake.

30 Oct 2009 — Technical difficulties

Our server has been locking up repeatedly over the past few days, apparently because our spam filter was consuming an obscene amount of memory. I have (probably) fixed the problem, and if it weren’t less than an hour before sunset on Friday, I would have an extensive and geeky rant about what happened, but instead I will just provide a user-friendly public-service announcement:

29 Oct 2009 — Bad advice costs nothing, and it’s worth the price

The Republicans in the House of Representatives have invited Iran-contra conspirator Oliver North to advise them on foreign policy. Colonel North’s chief foreign-policy accomplishment, as you may recall, involved a clandestine sale of arms to Iranian “moderates” in order to release American hostages being held by Hezbollah, with some of the profits being diverted to support anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. (Haven’t the Republicans been saying that negotiating with evil-doers makes the United States look weak? In this case, the fact that Hezbollah captured new American hostages to replace the ones they released kinda supports their point…) North was convicted of lying to Congress and illegally destroying government documents, but his convictions were overturned because the witnesses may have been influenced by testimony that North gave to Congress under a grant of immunity. (Don’t Republicans usually hate it when a convicted felon gets off scot-free because of some technicality involving a violation of the criminal’s Constitutional rights?)

27 Oct 2009 — Think of it as evolution inaction

Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, believes that human evolution is still happening because, after all, some couples have more children than others, thereby changing the frequency distribution of alleles in the gene pool. So he and his colleagues went over some statistics from the Framingham Heart Study (going back to 1948) and discovered a few heritable traits that were associated with higher fertility [PDF]. From this, they vaulted into the pages of Time magazine with this stunning extrapolation:

23 Oct 2009 — The future of S/M (hoisted from comments)

rm linked to a NYT article on how shouting is the new spanking, i.e., parents who diligently avoid hitting their kids are feeling guilty that they can’t also keep from yelling at them.

22 Oct 2009 — Pornonomics

The authors of Freakonomics, pimping their next book, regale Sunday Times [UK] readers with the heart-warming tale of Allie, a prostitute with a heart of gold and a Visa card to match. The authors mention the precautions she takes to keep herself safe from her clients, her frustration with keeping her occupation secret from her family and friends, and her realization that she had to move into a completely different career before she lost her looks. In the midst of all that, the authors declare:

22 Oct 2009 — If this is “Chicago-style politics”, let’s have more of it

House Judiciary Committee to insurance industry:

21 Oct 2009 — Cain’s best friend

The author of the “Everyone Needs Therapy” blog informs us that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and highlights a program, co-sponsored by the American Humane Association, to help abused women take their pets with them into shelters.

15 Oct 2009 — Teach the children well, and maybe they won’t fall for this when they grow up

The entrepreneurs who founded Absolute Best Care have come up with a brilliant business plan—or possibly a brilliant grift—and the New York Times doesn’t understand it.

13 Oct 2009 — Grand Old Pluralism

The Grand Old Party has a Grand New Web Site, which includes a helpful graphics-rich page listing the Republican Party’s noteworthy accomplishments.

11 Oct 2009 — See it in the new feature film, “Twilight of the Goths”

One of the perks of working in the geography biz is the trivia I pick up. For example, there is a place in Italy called Villa Emo.

09 Oct 2009 — He won the WHAT?!

Despite my Obama fanboyism, I think giving him the Nobel Peace Prize is premature at best and silly at worst. All of his major foreign-policy goals—getting troops out of Iraq, negotiating an end to Iran’s nuclear program, even closing Guantánamo—are still works in progress, so this is more an award for good intentions than for actual accomplishments. True, some other laureates (Bishop Tutu, for example) got their awards before finishing their peacemaking jobs, but in those cases one could argue that the prestige of the prize gave them credibility and influence that they needed. If the president of the United States of America needs that kind of boost to accomplish his mission, then our country’s international standing is even worse than I had previously imagined. And yeah, he’s Not George W. Bush, but by that standard of good behavior, three-quarters of the planet must be eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize.

09 Oct 2009 — Democrats grow spines, gonads, teeth

Many progressives, myself included, have been concerned that (a) Democratic politicians are so used to losing that they will continue to act like losers on the floor of Congress, even when they are in the majority; (b) with war, the economy, and health care at the front of most people’s minds, Obama and the Congressional Democrats will push LGBT issues to the back burner until, umm, half-past never.

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