Decline and fall of the Roman myth - Newspaper Edition - Times Online

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it's codswallop

CNN.com: Japan developing remote control for humans

I felt a mysterious, irresistible urge to start walking to the right whenever the researcher turned the switch to the right. I was convinced -- mistakenly -- that this was the only way to maintain my balance.

The phenomenon is painless but dramatic. Your feet start to move before you know it. I could even remote-control myself by taking the switch into my own hands.

There's no proven-beyond-a-doubt explanation yet as to why people start veering when electricity hits their ear. But NTT researchers say they were able to make a person walk along a route in the shape of a giant pretzel using this technique

CraftRobo is, if I understand this right, an inkjet that also has a paper cutter in it, so it cuts out the shape of what you print.

That is so money. Unfortunately, the currency is Yen only at the moment.

"Taking Liberty" by William A. Galston

George W. Bush's second inaugural address, with its sweeping rhetoric about the spread of freedom abroad and at home, sparked strong but varied reactions. Most of the president's conservative supporters ranked it with the greatest inaugural speeches, such as John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to bear any burden and pay any price in the service of human freedom and Lincoln's sermonic 1865 meditation on the inscrutable justice of God's judgment on those who deny freedom to others. The president's liberal critics were less laudatory, agreeing instead with former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan's surprising judgment that the speech fell “somewhere between dreamy and disturbing.” Whether the speech was a display of visionary statesmanship, or an exercise in hubristic overreach, is something only history can determine. But it is not too early to say that the speech was both a wakeup call to liberals—from whose vocabulary the evocative term “freedom” has been mostly absent in recent years—and a guide to the deep flaws in the modern conservative understanding of freedom.

Ever since reading RE/Search #4/5
as a child, I've been curious about the Dreamachine. Over time, it began to sound more like drug mythology ("dude... there's a machine, and you look at it for a few minutes and you start dreaming while you're awake! It's like tripping for free! And it's toooootally legal!") than something that actually existed.

Well I guess, to be fair, I really thought of it as wish fulfillment via drugs, i.e. that Gyson et. al. wanted a Dream Machine, and because they were so high on various drugs, they thought they had one.

Wow, that sounded very fair, didn't it?

Anyway, to my surprise the dream machine has been gaining a lot of attention lately, including a mention in the [cough sputter] New York Times.

Apparently, the dream machine is regaining popularity. There's even a guy selling 'em for $500-3,000. But you can make them for around $10, if you have a record player.

In case I ever want to build my own, I could.

So in Trinidad last weekend, a calf was born with 7 legs.

Here's the part that got my interest:

Rattandai Singh... described the birth of the seven leg calf as a miracle.

"We are living in the dark age which is called (Kalyug), and during this time miracles would happen all over the world, so no one should be surprised," she said

It's interesting to me that someone could look at the birth of an organism so mutated that it will be unable to walk, and probably would not survive a month in nature.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the original scoop.

David Pescovitz reports in the article the morphine in all of us that wired magazine is reporting that morphine [is] apparently in your head.

What does that mean for you? It means that you are a morphine factory, probably designed by centipedes in moroccan genetic/firework laboratories for the sole purpose of providing narrative pleasures to a hyped up crowd of sycophantic lower mammals--rodents and marsupials mainly. The pressure in you head will only be relieved by the installation of a tap and hose system, allowing the golden nectar to be sucked directly from your cranium, providing the purest of transcendental bliss to the centipedes most wealthy of customers, the rat-bastard (excuse the pun) chipmunks landlords of the field.

Paging Dr. Benway.

It's not as interesting as all that, but it did make me think of my old friend Bill. Basically, the idea is that morphine is a naturally occurring neurochemical, like serotonin or dopamine. By giving patients a precursor to morphine as opposed to synthetic morphine, researchers are having success with the brain generating morphine by itself.. presumably at more exact levels than a shot could provide.

If you can stand it, it's probably best to read the paper from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Endogenous formation of morphine in human cells -- Poeaknapo et al., 10.1073/pnas.0405430101 (abstract and full-text available)

For some reason, I keep getting into conversations about the Fundamentalist position that the world is less than 7,000 years old. I keep mentioning in these conversations that some guy actually figured out from the bible the date the world was created.

It turns out that some guy = Bishop James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin.

The date the world was created? Sunday October 23, 4004 BC.

What really took me by surprise was that Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden on the 10th of November later that year--only 18 days later. It hardly seems fair, if you think about it.

I mentioned this to Stabinski, and he replied "they were only there for a couple of pages"

True, true.

EroTech Industries has invented Bill Lee's dream/nightmare lunch date.

I guess it's more David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch than Burroughs, but still.

Yikes.

When I look at the Bunny Killers, I don't know whether to smile or sneer, laugh or cry.

CNN reports that Jessica Simpson will get her own series.

Is it the apocalypse yet?

Well, I guess I must be getting older because these days I seem to get all religious around the holiday season, and I start reading Isaac Bonewits' Homepage for little bits of the spiritual.

Well, as in the spirit of the old year, where lying was the vogue, I'll link you to Isaac's Halloween Errors and Lies, a compilation of fun facts and stories to make you feel better about Halloween, the Day of the Dead, etc.

Anti-Halloween propagandists use these claims to disrupt or prevent our religious rites, slander our beliefs, and blaspheme our deities, despite the total lack of evidence to support them:

• Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including
  the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have never found even one example of a “Satanic cult human sacrifice.” What they do occasionally find are budding psychopaths killing small animals in what a psychiatrist would call a “ritualistic” manner. As that link just cited puts it, “FBI expert K. J. Lanning defines a satanic murder as ‘one committed by two or more individuals who rationally plan the crime and whose primary motivation is to fulfill a prescribed satanic ritual calling for the murder.’ Using this definition he has been unable to identify even one documented satanic murder in the United States.”

• Similarly, the urban legends about “Satanic cults looking
  to kidnap blond blue-eyed children for sacrifice” (presumably
  by evil “non-Aryans”) reveal more about racism than
  crime in America because here, too, there is not a single
  real incident recorded by law enforcement agencies.

• All those stories of poisoned candy and razor blades in apples
  — which some Christian Fundamentalists would have
  us believe is how modern Witches and Druids now “sacrifice”
  kids — turn out to be more urban legends with zero law
  enforcement backing — see Curses! Broiled Again!: The Hottest Urban Legends Going, by noted folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand for details.

• Claims are made that “the ASPCA reports the evidence of animal mutilation and destruction is ten times more available on the week preceeding and the weekend following Halloween.I've been unable to get the ASPCA to back this up. Apparently, some pounds and animal control facilities may not adopt out black kittens to scary-looking teenagers just before Halloween, but the evidence on which they base these policies is unclear. It may just be another urban legend based on teenaged sociopaths killing animals in years past. See Wren Walker’s article on The Annual Halloween Scaredy Cat Ban for details.
  

-Read more at Halloween Errors and Lies

Anocht Oidhche Shamhna! Happy New Year!

The current Search Query Report:

#reqs: search term
-----: -----------
4: corgis biting
2: yoshi pictures attack
2: pictures of yoshi
1: shackle quests for iksar monks on everquest
1: ann coulter and pictures
1: legal sex at 13
1: kiev 60 mlu body
1: handsome boy modelling school
1: oidhche shamhna
1: ann coulter pics
1: ''messenger service'' winxp
1: suddenly everything sucks
1: microsoft messenger sucks
1: fisherspooner emerge lyrics
1: zoo sex blog
1: ann coulter sexy
1: fat lady singing
1: ann coulter
1: ultima ratio regum
1: kiev mlu

Well kids, we haven't looked at the "search query report" in a while so let's see how ol' uncle ilovich is doing up against the zeitgeist:

46: shiba inu pictures
35: pictures of yoshi
32: shiba inu pics
25: shiba inu puppy pictures
24: acid for mac
22: veritas numquam perit
14: shiba inu puppy
11: yoshi pictures
11: shiba inu images
11: ann coulter sexy
10: sexy ann coulter
10: homelandsecurity.com
8: gunthak
7: shiba inu
7: humansex
6: yoshi pics
6: kiev 60
6: squeak blog
5: gulf of gunthak
5: ultima ratio regum
352: [not listed: 291 search terms]

Those of you who know me well will be unsuprised by the fact that my dog generates more interest than I do. However, I now have data indicating how much more:

#reqs: %bytes: directory

-----: ------: ---------

    1:       : http://

   10:  0.01%: /everquest/

   91:  0.04%: /dreams/

   14:       : /reason/

 1820:  0.53%: /images/

   43:  0.04%: /photographemes/

   70:  0.07%: /games/

 2791:  0.23%: /MT/

 4609:  2.97%: /archives/

21814: 92.90%: /yoshi/

 1812:  1.80%: [root directory]

 2150:  1.39%: /sqicons/

There you have it. conclusive data that Yoshi is approximately 9 times more interesting than I am. Perhaps it's time that dog got his own website and started paying for his keep with ad revenue.

But Infiltration does. I've been jealous of the courageous urban exploreres for so long... there are so many sites that I've wanted to explore, but for some reason I never feel, I' don't know, allowed.

Kind of weird, now that I think about it.

On each blanket the ladies sewing club embroider, by computer sewing machine, the following love message in hippie street language: Jesus Kicks Down Phat. Prayerline 1-877-566-7264.

They will also help you keep your self safe from UFOs. Right. On.

Kingdom%u2019s Leading Executioner Says: "I Lead a Normal Life"

Good for you, pal. Good for you.

On that Fisherspooner song Emerge, does he say "hypermedia critique" or "hyper mediocrity?."

Anyone who knows me knows that I don't put much stock in prophecy, and I'm not a christian...but still, this really creeped me out, sort of like the Nostradamus documentary I saw when I was 10:

Does it make you think of anything?

This + this.

Makes you think. Oh wait--me, not you.

I'm getting less and less hits these days. I must be getting more and more out of touch with the mainstream... maybe I should start blogging more about current events, or celebrities or something. Or maybe just keep posting stuff with the words "ann coulter sexy" so I can keep getting the same couple people over and over again... I guess I did get some traffic over the Eric Hall incident, so that's nice to know my opinion is out on that one.

I apologise to everyone that my comments are still broken. I don't know how to fix it, but I'm looking into it.

#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

   22: direct advertiser 

   11: ann coulter sexy

    7: webdav apache

    6: teh suck

    6: james smoak

    3: sexy ann coulter

    3: everquest blog

    3: microsoft messenger service

    3: abe krieger

    2: momoko kikuchi

    2: ninja power braggable

    2: humansex with animals

    2: messenger service winxp

    2: goebbels with tits

    2: cookeville police officer eric hall

    2: ann coulter

    2: turning japanese

    2: winxp messenger service

    2: blog everquest

    2: projectbuilder bluej

EDIT: I guess I'd better make a style sheet for preformatted text, huh? That line spacing, oy! How ya lack me no?

Weird. I was just cruising amazon.de and I found out that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) will be shipping on June 21. Cool!

What's weird is that the same information is not available on the US website. /shrug.

A neat article from the NYT From Wolf to Dog, Yes, but When? addresses a couple recently released studies about the history of the human-dog bond.

One of the studies found that dogs have a unique ability to intuit things based on human behavior that is not found in either chimpanzees or wolves--even when the wolves are raised by humans.

Chimpanzees will notice where a person is looking but do not take the hint that the box being looked at is the one holding the hidden food. Dogs get the picture immediately, Dr. Hare reports.

When two species live together for a long time, each usually influences the genetically conferred qualities of the other. People may have selected preferred abilities in the dog, but dogs too may have fostered their favorite qualities in people — not of course deliberately but simply by giving people who used dogs a better chance of surviving than people who did not.

Wow, the month is not up but it looks like the inscrutible Abe Krieger has replaced "sexy ann coulter" as my zeitgeist topic. 'gywo' is getting a respectable number of click-throughs as well, but man it seems like everybody is looking for Abe Krieger. I hope they don't think I was too mean in my response to his letter to the Daily News, but hey... he called me a loser (by proxy).

#req: search term
---53: abe krieger
---23: webdav apache
---18: gywo
----8: ann coulter
----5: sexy ann coulter
----4: photographist
----4: ann coulter sexy
----4: q330904
----3: leggos
----2: funny logs
----2: teh suck
----2: ann coulter sucks
----2: perl cocoa
----2: daylin leech
----2: dialog between peter and uncle ben*
----2: foofy
----1: zentner 2002 email addresses
----1: project builder javac cocoa
----1: messenger service spam winxp
----1: momoko kikuchi
---65: [not listed: 65 search terms]

* For regular readers, I actually did this web search and realized that this is a search for something related to the Spiderman movie, and not some lesser known folktale about the first pope and a corporate logo having a conversation.

just when you thought you had heard all the excuses in the book....

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Customs agents said they
found 13 pounds of Ecstasy pills in the luggage of a Dutch woman who expressed surprised (sic) at the discovery — she told investigators she thought she was smuggling gold.

Philadelphia's City Paper just had a nice cover story about Ghost Towns in Pennsylvania. It seems like everybody knows about Centralia, the burning ghost town in Western PA. But I had never heard of Celestia, an old millerite community Sullivan County PA. which sounds really cool... or Laquin, both of which sound interesting and creepy to visit, if I felt like driving the 6 hours to get there.

Nothing about bush I know. I just felt like referencing the byrne/eno record, k?

Well, just a quick check of stats... not so good yet this month...I must be off the zeitgeist. I feel really bad for whoever searched for "webdav apache" and wound up here. "shoo sex" I don't even want to know... and "dialog between peter and uncle ben" I have to do that search myself.

#reqs: search term
-----2: webdav apache
-----1: shoo sex
-----1: fuzzzy
-----1: momoko kikuchi
-----1: sex blog
-----1: giant footprint
-----1: dialog between peter and uncle ben
-----1: druid quadding

Well, it's that time of the month. No, not that. It's search query report time! This is a list of the terms that people have used to find my website. I'm hapy to report that "gywo" (for Get your War On, I hope) has surpassed "ann coulter sexy"* finally. So if you're an Ann Coulter fan, and you think she's sexy you better get back to your googling and clicking, buddy.

11: gywo
08: ann coulter sexy
08: dell dude
06: leggos
06: sexy ann coulter
05: ann coulter
04: momoko kikuchi apple
04: gaak
03: photographist
03: teh suck
03: delldude
03: the dell dude
03: sneakernet
03: cocoa blog
03: illovich
03: humansex
02: ha ha so funny
02: sexy liberals
02: blog ethics
02: sandman vs spiderma

* I note with some reluctance that "ann coulter sexy" and "sexy ann coulter" combined are still ahead of "gywo."

Well, today is Samhain/Halloween, the Celtic New year. Happy New Year!!!

What am I talking about? I'll let an expert, Issac Bonewits explain, by quoting from his excellent article Halloween History: the Real Origins:

"Samhain or "Samhuinn" is pronounced "sow-" (as in female pig) "-en" (with the neutral vowel sound) — not "Sam Hain" — because "mh" in the middle of an Irish word is a "w" sound (don’t ask me why, it’s just Irish). Known in Modern Irish as Lá Samhna, in Welsh as Nos Galen-gaeof (that is, the "Night of the Winter Calends"), and in Manx as Laa Houney (Hollantide Day), Sauin or Souney, Samhain is often said to have been the most important of the fire festivals, because (according to most Celtic scholars) it may have marked the Celtic New Year. At the least, Samhain was equal in importance to Beltane and shared many symbolic characteristics. Samhain was the original festival that the Western Christian calendar moved its "All Saint's Day" to (Eastern Christians continue to celebrate All Saints' Day in the spring, as the Roman Christians had originally). Since the Celts, like many cultures, started every day at sunset of the night before, Samhain became the "evening" of "All Hallows" ("hallowed" = "holy" = "saint") which was eventually contracted into "Hallow-e'en" or the modern "Halloween."

Whether it was the Celtic New Year or not, Samhain was the beginning of the Winter or Dark Half of the Year (the seasons of Geimredh=Winter and Earrach=Spring) as Beltane was the beginning of the Summer or Light Half of the Year (the seasons of Samradh=Summer and Foghamhar=Fall). The day before Samhain is the last day of summer (or the old year) and the day after Samhain is the first day of winter (or of the new year). Being "between" seasons or years, Samhain was (and is) considered a very magical time, when the dead walk among the living and the veils between past, present and future may be lifted in prophecy and divination."

I've felt an ambivalence about this holiday for a long time, and I'm not sure why. I certainly like the idea of it as a new year celebration rather than a candy grab fest... maybe I'm just old and the commercialization of holidays is getting to me now. Or maybe it's because anytime I try to get myself up in a costume, it sucks.

Whatever the cause, I do like thinking of today as the new year, because it just feels more sensible (I've never been particularly fond of december 31st/New Years Eve either). Am I just being difficult? Do I just have a knee-jerk reaction to the status quo and try as hard as I can to dissent?

Nah. The staus quo sucks, and society is run by the kids you hated in school. I'm right as rain. The only problem is, who do I celebrate new year with? I don't know any pagans, and I sort of even feel weird thinking of myself as a pagan... maybe it's because pagan is an exterior term, imposed by the romans. It's weird also, because even though I accept polytheism as true (or is that more true?), I don't really worship any gods or anything. I'm just not a worshipping kind of person. I don't even worship nature. I don't even go camping.

Happy New Year!

It turns out that worsification is a real word, but it means the "composition of bad verses."

Clearly a crime of which I am guilty.

The following searches led people to my blog in the last month:

4: ann coulter sexy
3: sexy ann coulter
2: illovich
2: photographist
2: neverwinter adult -dragon
2: ann coulter
2: ha ha so funny
1: blog alli john
1: sandman vs spiderman
1: dreamy photo
1: blog in marketing
1: dnd adventures
1: plugin photo fx 2.0
1: cat alien
1: leggos
1: replacements ltd blog
1: sex blog
1: teh suck
1: my so called rights
1: what is a marketing ploy

A woefully underreported story about CNN News Gettin' Jiggy With da Jive Talkin' has crossed my desk, and I am absolutely delighted.

Perhaps the next step would be to convince Puffy, Anthony Kiedis or Pink to step up to an anchor position.

Personally, I would make Pink the meteorologist, and do a tank girl style every 3 second camera cut to Pink in another outfit and hairstyle. Nobody cares about the weather anyway.

I am an instructional designer. Lucky.
One of the things I do is help people scan and OCR long documents with a scanner. Sometimes this produces something like poetry:

JAVIER ALREADY UHHH ! TEN (10) WITHOUT GONZALO

IT'S TRUE.

S SO NICE.

ALLIGATOR'S

IT ALLIGATOR'S Underkoffler

Don't ask me. I don't make 'em up, I just report 'em.

Surfing the web, as I am wont to do, I found a Collection of Tongue Twisters in German, which pleased me. Germans call them Zungenbrecher which means "tongue breaker." Aufnahmeausschusssitzung!

I also learned that a shibboleth is "a word or phrase used as a test for detecting foreigners, or persons from another district, by their pronunciation." (OED, but cited on the Zungenbrecher page) Like "water" I guess.

And the word sewer has been in the English language unchanged since it's first recorded usage according to the OED, not counting an erroneous spelling, seward which apparently was somebody's idea that sewers were called that because they all flow sea-ward. Get it?

Am Zehnten Zehnten um zehn Uhr zehn zogen zehn zahme Ziegen zehn Zentner Zucker zum Zoo.

If you don't like the German ones, try the English ones. Or try one in another language. Machts mir nix.

So I was looking at the logs for illovich.com, one of my favorite websites.

I found the graphs of search requests leading to illovich.com pehaps the funniest:

The top is phrases, bottom is words.

What I find funniest is that people are actually searching for the phrases "wan too" and "teh suck."

That's not nearly as dirty as it sounds. According to the OED, abracock is an obsolete spelling of apricot. I saw it when I looked up 'abracadabra', which in case you care is:

"A cabalistic word, formerly used as a charm, and believed to have the power, when written in a triangular arrangement, and worn round the neck, to cure agues, etc. Now often used in the general sense of a spell, or pretended conjuring word; a meaningless word of mysterious sound; jargon, gibberish. "

Aren't you glad you stopped by?

Saw it. It was decent I guess...I liked how it sort of stuck to the Spiderman mythos or whatever (uncle ben, aunt may &c.), but the writing was fairly bad, especially any meaningful dialog between the characters, and certainly his beginning and ending narrations.

Kat and I had fun guffawing at it though, and as every one is aware the special effeccts were fantastic...I think probably the best human cgi animations I've seen. Harry becomes the Hobgoblin in the fourth movie, right? After James Franco is replaced by an even weaker James Dean wannabe in the seccond or third movie?

My bet is the next villain is none other than Harvey Keitel as the Rhino. Think about it...it would be decent. Or maybe Elton John as Dr. Octopus. Huey Lewis as the Sandman?

Got a new computer at work today to replace the now ancient PIII 500 that was regularly grinding to a halt on my desk. I got a Dell, dude. Unfortunately there was no speccial offer to punch the delldude in the head, or electric shock him or something.

I would pay money for that.

oh well, as Zebadee would say: "Time for bed."