Teleidoscope

Sun, Sep 20, 2009

Mary Traver, RIP

Posted at 10:34 am MDT to Current Events

The very best eulogy for Mary Travers that I have seen is atUser Friendly.

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Mon, Jul 20, 2009

Apollo 11 40th Anniversary

Posted at 10:12 pm MDT to Current Events

I remember watching the TV coverage with my parents and brothers. We got very little sleep because important information kept becoming available. It was handy that the landing happened on a Saturday: no one needed to get up early the next day.

It'ds a little sad that Walter Cronkite died just a few days before the anniversay, but it is hard to complain about a 92 year lie-span.

On Sunday I stayed glued to the TV while my parents (and brothers?) went to pick up our new puppy at the breeders'. We named him Buzz: it was pretty much unthinkable to get a dog that weekend and not give him a name that referred to the landing.

Looking back, I'm not sure why he didn't end up just named Apollo. Maybe that wouldn't have been specific enough. (His name on the official kennel club papers was Buzz of Apollo.)

Buzz was a pure-bred toy fox terrier (short-haired), but the genes had recombined oddly. When he was 3 months old he was already as big as his mother, and he ended up about midway in size between toy and standard fox terriers. Basically, he came out looking a lot like a Jack Russell terrier in his size and markings -- when I see Jack Russells, I always think they are fox terriers.

He had one ear that stood up like a chihahua ear, and the tip of the other ear flopped down, so he also looked a lot like the RCA dog, except his tail had been cropped.

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Sat, Jul 18, 2009

Jimmy Carter Has Left the Southern Baptists

Posted at 6:01 pm MDT to Current Events

A group called the Elders that he is a member of is pushing for better treatment of women, and he has decided that working from inside the system is not working. His announcement is here.

The Elders was apparently formed in 2007, with funding raised by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. Other members include Desmond Tutu, South African archbishop emeritus of Capetown; former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan; Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel laureate and founder of the Green Bank in Bangladesh. Also Indian microfinance leader Ela Bhatt; former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland; former Chinese ambassador to the United States Li Zhaoxing. And they left an empty chair for Aung San Suu Kiy.

I found the link to Jimmy Carter's decision on Making Light.

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Thu, Jul 16, 2009

Alice's Restaurant

Posted at 9:57 pm MDT to Current Events

One of the bloggers at the history blog Edge of the American West has posted a great little Youtube video in honor of the 42nd anniversary the the debut of the song Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie.

Note: Muppets are a running theme on "Edge of the American".

The lyrics to Arlo's song are here.

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Fri, Jul 03, 2009

Republican Governors

Posted at 5:48 pm MDT to Current Events

Damn.

I wonder if there was something in the water at the last Republican Governors Conference meeting.

Neither Sarah Palin nor Mark Sanford seems able to hold a coherent press conference.

Sanford is not resigning yet, despite dereliction of duty and profound public stupidity.

I wonder what the investigators were about to dig up that led Palin to resign so that the state need not spend lots of money investigating her?

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Wed, May 06, 2009

Wesleyan University Shooting

Posted at 4:52 pm MDT to Current Events

Whoa.

There was a shoooting at Wesleyan University in Connecticut this afternoon: a junior woman was murdered. It technically took place just off the campus, but the building is the one that serves as the university book store. I spent a lot of time in that bookstore, once upon a time, though in my day it did not include the cafe where the shooting took place.

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Tue, Mar 24, 2009

Hero Parrot

Posted at 8:17 pm MDT to Current Events

The Denver Red Cross has given an award to a Quaker parrot that saved the life of a toddler his owner was babysitting. The little girl started choking on a piece of pop-tart while the sitter was in the restroom, and Willie the parrot squawked and flapped his wings and yelled "Momma Baby" and made noises his owner had never heard him make before, so she hurried back into the room in time to perform the Heimlich maneuver.

Willie was only about a year old, so he didn't have a huge vocabulary, but according to the original report he did know how to say things other than Momma and Baby. It seems that he not only recognized that there was a problem and gave the alarm, he used words that were contextually appropriate.

Clever bird. I wonder if he knows it is himself he sees in mirrors...

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Thu, Feb 05, 2009

Supreme Court

Posted at 1:02 pm MST to Current Events

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been hospitalized with one of the deadlier forms of cancer (pancreatic).

I am sooo glad her replacement, if one is needed, will not be nominated by a Republican. The thought of having a supreme court justice selected by the same process that came up with Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate is scary.

Mind you, it would be nice to have a Chief Justice capable of performing a public ceremony without flubbing it, but I'll settle for the likelihood that any Justices appointed in the next few years will be moderate to liberal and acquainted with the Constitution..

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Sat, Jan 31, 2009

How Screwed We are

Posted at 12:33 pm MST to Current Events

The Calculated Risk economics blog has a lovely summary of the economic results that have been reported in January.

CR does wonderful graphs. Very depressing at the moment, but very thorough. There have been a lot of headlines lately about things cliff-diving or falling off cliffs. Or setting nasty records.

Another ongoing series at CR is Four Bad Bears, which compares the progress of the stock market in the current (S&P 500 values) recession (-51.9 percent at the bottom about 300 trading days in, currently -47.2 about 360 days in) with the 1973-1974 (-48.2 at the bottom, 420 trading days in) and 2000-2002 recessions (-49.1 at the bottom, 660 days in) (S&P 500 values) and the Great Depression of the 20th Century (-89.2% 840 days in)(DJIA values).

Those weren't the only recessions we've had, of course. Just some of the bad bear markets.

Can I just say "Arrrrgggh."

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Wed, Jan 21, 2009

Cute

Posted at 3:12 pm MST to Current Events

This image of Obama fighting Darth Vader reminds me of a couple of jokes that were going around yesterday.

People kept comparing Dick Cheney in his wheelchair to Dr. Strangelove.

And political blogger atrios asked "Who invited Mr. Potter?" referring to the wheelchair-ridden villain of It's a Wonderful Life. People were making separated at birth jokes even before Cheney ended up in the wheelchair.

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Tue, Jan 20, 2009

Helicopter

Posted at 11:09 am MST to Current Events

I took a break to watch the inauguration...

Shrub is gone. Finally. He is on the helicopter and leaving Washington. The news guys are saying that people were cheering him, but I think it is likely that many of them were cheering the fact that he was leaving.

Last night in Dupont Circle people were throwing shoes at a giant inflated effigy of GWB.

President Obama's inauguration address was impressive, and well-delivered, which is still refreshing.(Talking Points Memo has the full text.) I hope that he follows through on cleaning up corruption and inequity (and iniquity) as he claimed he would.

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Mon, Jan 19, 2009

Fiat Chrysler

Posted at 11:40 pm MST to Current Events

Fiat is reported to be buying a chunk of Chrysler.

But that's not what I came here to talk about today.

The cars my parents owned that I remember the makes of were a Fiat, two Plymouth Valiants and a Volkswagen Beetle (a real one, not one of these remakes they sell now) which overlapped with the two Valiants.

The Fiat was white, the first Valiant and the Beetle were very light blue, and the car before the Fiat was a light blue and white station wagon. The second Valiant was gold with a darker top because after 15 years or so of driving pale colored cars my parents finally realized that pale cars tend to disappear in the snow fogs mist and drizzle that make up a lot of Connecticut weather.

I hate the fact that rental cars are very often white, and I've never owned a vehicle that was weather-colored. (Medium green Maverick, medium blue Escort, gold Subaru, red Dodge Ram 50 with a white topper, red Dakota with a red topper.)

But that's not what I came here to talk about either.

I don't know if it still happens now that everything is built up, but I can remember when a moose would occasionally wander down the Connecticut River into the Hartford area. It usually ended up in among the big gas and oil storage tanks near Hartford, and the Fish and Game people would shoot it with a tranq and it would drop dead because its heart couldn't take the stress.

I suspect it doesn't happen as often now that the river is lined by roads and urban and suburban construction instead of farms. I can (dimly) remember when there were fields of shade tobacco growing where a lot of the highway interchanges around Hartford are now. Before the interstates and their surrounding development came in, the gas and oil tanks were the first complete break from woods and agricultural land a moose wandering down from Vermont through Massachusetts would encounter along the river.

Of course, we would never have heard about the moose that came down the river, took one look a the city and turned around and went north again.

The particular moose I have in mind came wandering down in the spring of '64 or maybe the fall of '63.

There was a period of several months before the new house was finished and we moved to southeastern Connecticut when my Dad was driving the little white Fiat every morning from Manchester CT, across the river from Hartford, to New London where his job was. He left very early in the mornings (five-ish?), and at that time of year in Connecticut he was driving in the dark.

One day Dad came home from work and told us about a close call he had that morning. I t had been foggy that morning, and he had nearly hit a huge dark animal, too big to be a horse or cow, that loomed up out of the mist ahead of him.

That day or the next there was a newspaper article about a moose among the oil tanks again and we realized that was what Dad almost hit. Or vice versa: that moose probably weighed as much as the Fiat. Considering the damage that hitting a deer can do to a car, I think the Fiat would have lost the fight with a moose completely.

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Mon, Jan 05, 2009

New Teeth

Posted at 10:02 pm MST to Current Events

I inherited fairly bad teeth from my Mom's family. The original biting surfaces of my molars had lots of little branching valleys on top, instead of the few big ones that are normal. The biting surfaces I've had for years have been metal (7 molars) and fancier materials (1 molar). But all of my teeth have live roots-- it was just the top surfaces that went.

I'm supposed to get one of the gold crowns replaced soon. It was the last one that went in, and I think the dentist waited to long to replace the surface of the adjoining tooth, which is the one with the spaceage crown instead of gold.

Based on an article linked from Slashdot, it now looks like scientists are about a year from regrowing new living teeth-roots from tooth stem cells for people who have lost the real ones. They are predicting 5 to 10 years until they are able to grow teeth on demand to replace missing ones in adults.

I never knew my mother's parents when they had their own teeth. I only remember them with dentures.

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Tue, Dec 23, 2008

Madoff

Posted at 2:25 pm MST to Current Events

Crap.

I just got an email from the ACLU. Two foundations that had pledged massive (a combined amount of 850,000.00) support for the ACLU for 2009 have been wiped out by the unravelling of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. That money is gone.

So the ACLU is taking a major hit even though they weren't the ones who were careless or duped. They are asking for contributions to help make up the shortfall.

I've already finished my budgeted charitable giving for the 2008, but I may send them some money after the first of the year. I'm going to try to spread my charitable giving out through the year better than I have in the past, so less of it hits right at the same time as Christmas shopping.

Maybe I'll make the ACLU one of the first 'charities of the month' for 2009. I think Obama is less slimy than most politicians, but with the wars and the economy I think it will be easy for the powers that be in Washington to let the recent constitutional abuses continue unless someone continues to make a fuss about the problems.

I wonder if any of my other charities got hit by Madoff's shenanigans.

I just hate it when people who have been dealing in good faith get screwed.

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Tue, Dec 16, 2008

Charities 2008

Posted at 1:22 pm MST to Current Events

It's amazing how difficult some charities still make it to donate.

Rocky Mountain Revels puts on a very nice show of holiday music, and I donated to them last year. But they don't seem to take donations on their website, and I don't think I will be attending the show this year, so I won't get a donation envelope. Looks like they are out of luck.

I've added some addtional charities this year, and changed amounts to give more locally. This year's list so far is below. I recommend any or all of them.

• United Way
• Wesleyan University Alumni Fund
• Boulder Philharmonic
• Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
• Free Software Foundation (FSF)
• The Heifer Project
• Habitat for Humanity
• Amnesty International
• ACLU
• Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres
• Alzheimer's Association There was a fund drive in honor of Terry Pratchett this spring
• The Women's Bean Project (and I love their 10 Bean Soup)
• Denver Art Museum
• Denver Zoo
• Denver Museum of Nature and Science
• (Boulder) Community FoodShare
• (Boulder) Boulder Shelter for the Homeless

I am trying to tithe my net pay, which is a hefty amount of donations, so I end up on the charity hot-prospect lists and I get letters from every charity imaginable. I set some of the letters aside for further investigation and I'll be reviewing some of them since I haven't reached my goal yet this year. There was one microbank (like Heifer project but for businesses other than livestock raising) that looked interesting if they seem reputable after I google them. And the right wing has been attacking Planned Parenthood's funding in various ways. I'd like one more local charity that actually helps people, too. There's a fund to help Colorado people heat their houses this winter that might be a candidate.

I will not be giving to the Salvation Army -- their national organization has been being stupid about gays again this year, after showing signs of improvement since the bad days of the early AIDS epidemic. They have a right to follow their own beliefs, and I have a right to not give my money to an organization with a history of being bigots. Maybe I'll give some money to the Boulder County Aids Project instead.

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Tue, Dec 02, 2008

Oh, Canada!

Posted at 12:56 pm MST to Current Events

There are 4 parties and a couple of independent representatives in the Canadian Parliament. They just had a federal election a few weeks ago, and in the aftermath the Conservative Prime Minister announced some policies that were considered overly heavy-handed (and in some cases outrageous) for a party that had about 30 percent of the electorate, not an outright majority.

The other parties have gotten together and are forming a coalition government composed of everybody else (give or take the couple of independents): representatives of more than 60 % of the Canadian population.

Th Conservatives are calling it a 'coup' even though it is a perfectly proper process in the parliamentary system. But the Canadian Conservatives seem to have a lot in common with the Republicans in terms of stupidity, arrogance, economic obliviousness and a willingness to play fast and loose with the Constitution (which is what drove three parties that don't much like each other to make common cause).

The Governor General is returning from a trip outside the country. If she doesn't go along with the Conservatives who want to torpedo the change of government, the Conservative regime will have lasted a record-setting 3 weeks from election to dissolution.

Th ability to throw the bums out in short order seems very attractive after the last 8 years.

And their election process lasted a couple of months, not a couple of years.

But it may be interesting watching the Liberals, New Democratic Party and Parti Quebecois trying to cooperate.

If nothing else, some of these guys have style: at one point while the coalition was still just rumors, former Prime Minister Jan Chretien (NDP) answered a reporter's questions "Je ne comprends pas anglais".

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Thu, Nov 13, 2008

Temple

Posted at 6:34 pm MST to Current Events

By way of Slashdot and Smithsonian: archaeologists have found a huge 11000 year old temple site in Turkey. That means it was built before there was writing or cities or most agriculture.

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Planet Pictures

Posted at 6:14 pm MST to Current Events

Wow. Scientists have taken pictures of planets in two different solar systems.

They have a picture from Hubble of a single planet about 4 times as far from Fomalhaut as Neptune is from the Sun. Fomalhaut is 25 light years from here.

They also have a picture from one of the big infrared telescopes of TWO planets orbiting HR8799, which is 130 light years from earth. (A third planet has been located in that system.)

Somebody needs to start giving planets we actually have pictures of better names than Fomalhaut B and HR8799b and HR8799c.

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Tue, Nov 04, 2008

Election Day

Posted at 10:52 am MST to Current Events

Gah.

Stress and anxiety attacks. I was going to blog about past elections (the first one I remember was Kennedy/Nixon) but I'm too jittery. I don't think voting early has helped my stress levels as much as I had hoped. It's one disadvantage of working at home: I've been bombarded with radio ads all day every day, and having already voted means there was nothing more I could do about them.

Today is the election. Less than 5 and a half hours until results start coming in.

I just got off the phone with my broker (I'm consolidating 401k and IRA money from various places, and we were discussing investing the first third or so of it.)

Tomorrow I travel to Boston on an 8:15am flight. Returning Sunday. I may or may not blog between now and Monday. I'll be staying two nights with relatives who don't have an active net presence.

My oven is not working right. I will try it again later, and if it still doesn't behave right, I'll give the repair guys a call so that I can have an appointment early next week.

I need to make a quick shopping trip to stock up on St. John's Wort before the trip. Possibly with a quick trip into town if more IRA checks arrive in today's mail to be rolled over.

The server is backed up, but I feel too jittery to be safe reconfiguring it. I think this evening I will do a direct backup of the laptop to the terabyte drive, and wait until I get back to play with the drive settings of the server.

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Sat, Oct 25, 2008

Global Electoral College

Posted at 9:27 pm MDT to Current Events

The Economist has created a Global Electoral College map based on a poll of people from all over the world, with each country getting a certain number of electoral votes out of a total of 9875. (Every country get at least 3 votes, like the states.)

Their current projection is that McCain/Palin would get 278 electoral votes (Cuba, Macedonia, ex-Soviet Georgia, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Namibia).

Suriname, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Pacific Islands like Fiji, Yemen, Somalia, and some Saharan and West African countries are undecided.

Obama/Biden has 9009 electoral votes on their map.

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Fri, Oct 24, 2008

Gap

Posted at 10:15 pm MDT to Current Events

According to the evening news, a third of the Colorado electorate has already voted and Obama has a 13% lead in that portion of the voting. They say it is already unlikely that McCain can carry Colorado unless he can somehow manage a landslide among the remaining voters, which seems unlikely based on current opinion polls.

Mind you, the McCain campaign appears to have gone collectively insane at this point (the lynch mob behavior at their rallies and that twit who lied about being attacked by a black Obama supporter being cases in point).

I expect things to get even nastier over the next 10 days.

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Tue, Oct 14, 2008

Teddy Roosevelt Speech

Posted at 8:32 pm MDT to Current Events

On The Edge of the American West there is a great article about an assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt on this day in 1912.

The article's title is "I am all right, and you cannot escape listening to my speech either." That's a quote from TR's hour-long speech, which he made after being shot and before going for medical treatment: he showed off his bloody shirt.

In the speech, he said that the nastiness of the rhetoric in the current political campaign (he was a 3rd party candidate and that election was really nasty) was partly responsible for the assassination attempt,

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Tue, Oct 07, 2008

Election Ads

Posted at 8:44 pm MDT to Current Events

We're doing voting-by-mail in Colorado. I got my ballot on Saturday.

I filled out the ballot yesterday and dropped it off at the County Clerk's office today. So I have now voted, 4 weeks ahead of schedule. (I wasn't likely to change my mind about any of the candidates and issues.)

I'm finding that election ads are even more annoying now that I have already voted. It's hard to believe that is possible. I listen to the radio all day while I am working, so I hear a lot of them.

Man, there are some nasty campaigns this year.

I hope everyone else listening has their teeth set on edge as much as I do by the people doing the commercials against the repeal of the oil and gas subsidy. But I'm afraid that with the oil and gas companies pouring $25 million into the ads and mailings, I suspect it will probably fail.

After I dropped off the ballot and ran a couple of other errands, I spent some time walking on the Pearl Street Mall. The weather was beautiful --shirtsleeve weather -- and may be some of the last really nice weather for a while. They say we may have our first snow flurry of the season later this week.

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Fri, Oct 03, 2008

Amendments 2008

Posted at 12:09 pm MDT to Current Events

Interesting. Business and labor organizations have joined forces to remove four proposed amnedments from the ballot in NOvember (they will still appear, but votes for them will be ignored). They are also allying to fight 3 others which are seen as both bad for unions and for the state economy.

The ones removed from the ballot are:

Amendment 53 A "corporate fraud" initiative that would have made an executive criminally liable for fraudulent activity they know about but fail to report within their businesses.

Amendment 55 A ban on firing employees without a specific reason and the ability for them to sue if they decide they've been improperly let go.

Amendment 56 A proposed requirement that employers with 20 or more employees pay for 80 percent of an individual's health care premiums or 70 percent of dependent coverage.

Amendment 57 A safe workplace measure that would have allowed injured employees to seek additional damages in court beyond workers compensation benefits. (Which kind of defeats to purpose of workmen's comp, which is to keep workers and employers out of court.)

The ones unions and business will fight together are:

Amendment 47 A "right-to-work" amendment messing with union vote procedures.

Amendment 49 Preventing governments in Colorado from taking union dues, etc. as part of the employees withholdings, which makes the employees pay their dues as a separate bill.

Amendment 54 A proposed ban on sole-source government contractors contributing to political candidates which apparently written to squelch contributions from unions with government contracts. Possibly union members, too?

That leaves us with 48, 50 and 58 that have been getting lots of radio ads.

Amendment 48 is stupid and evil. It defines fertilized eggs as human beings, effectively outlawing all abortions and many kinds of birth control. I haven't heard it mentioned, but this would logically also criminalize miscarriages. Including natural failures of the egg to implant, which are very, very common but not (currently) detectable.

Amendment 50 lets the gambling towns in the mountains raise their stakes limits in return for a cut of the take being given to community colleges. I will probably vote for that one.

Amendment 58 repeals tax breaks for oil and gas companies, in this time of record profits. The energy companies are fighting it tooth and nail, which leads me to believe that it is probably a good idea. About 60% of the money would be used for scholarships to state colleges and universities, and the rest is earmarked for clean energy projects and cleaning up environmental damage from previous oil and gas projects (especially ground water cleanup). I really think that's a better use for the money than shoring up the profits of out-of-state conglomerates.

The other items on the ballot don't seem to be controversial.

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Fri, Sep 26, 2008

Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov

Posted at 9:36 pm MDT to Current Events

Charlie Stross has an article about Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, who probably saved civilization 25 years ago today in 1983.

In this time of arrogant slime in high places, it is good to remember that there are people of sense, goodwill and true, quiet heroism in the world.

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