Month: May 2005

  • Drinking blood, and other natural family values

    Speaking of kids and childish things, it turns out that blood drinking is natural. At least, so elementary school kids are being taught in Philadelphia: “Why,” asked one third grader from the Independence Charter School, “do they drink blood?” Her question, directed at Herman Bingham, a board member of the East Africa Resource and Study…

  • Star Wars is childish!

    Everyone’s talking about Star Wars, including me. Only I haven’t seen the latest entry in the series, which makes me more objective. Justin’s doing a good job of keeping readers informed, which lets me completely off the hook — not only as a reviewer, but even as a spectator. I don’t need to see it.…

  • Second Opinions

    Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings posted this link weeks ago, but I’ve been too lazy to point it out. Till now. Cause I know you want it. The Jedi Order?s mistakes in dealing with Anakin Skywalker are numerous and damning. First, the Order was aware from the very start that Anakin missed his mother, yet…

  • Green on the inside

    Walking through Valley Forge National Park, I came across a rotting greenhouse, which is being taken over by disorderly vegetation. There are probably some wild flowers growing inside of it, but I preferred the tiny buttercups in the field of tall grass nearby. I’m still using the lazy old clunker Epson camera. One of these…

  • Happy Memorial Day!

    A lot of people are probably traveling, and I’m not going to be around much today. So I’ll leave a travel tip based on something that happened yesterday when I wasn’t looking. When you’re packing, be sure to check the trunk before you slam it and leave! Otherwise, this might happen: Without making a sound,…

  • More Star Warz

    Reader Clint thinks that I should devote more time to the political elements in “Revenge of the Sith”, and forget about the engineering shortcomings. I am mildly rebuked for focusing on minutiae. He further maintains that the secessionist, tax-dodging villains might have been the real heroes of the piece. It?s an intriguing notion. That interpretation…

  • Sympathetic thoughts

    The sculpture above (with its glaringly empty eye socket) reminded me that yesterday, just as I was brushing up on sympathetic ophthalmia, I checked my yahoo email, and a reader sent me a biographical essay mentioning the visual problems of Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith: Linebarger was reared in a High Church Episcopalian family. Alan…

  • Expanding the war on terror to Star Wars?

    Does the war on terror now include a federal war on unlawful Star Wars downloads? United States law enforcement agents raided a series of servers allegedly hosting file-sharing servers. Operation D-Elite targeted sites supporting files using the BitTorrent protocol, focusing especially on the EliteTtorrents site. “Torrents” make files available in many small sections, which increases…

  • Unburying more hate crimes

    More hate crimes! And here’s the proof: If that’s not hateful, I don’t know what is. And for a city like San Francisco to allow hate crime like the above to go on is shocking! While it remains to be determined what actual crime was committed, the victims clearly were selected because of their race…

  • Fear of hatred? Or hatred of fear?

    I was talking about hate crimes so much that I never stopped to ask some basic questions. What is hate? Is hate just another loaded term, or does it mean something? I always thought of hate as an emotion. The opposite of love, perhaps. Something that makes you lose control. When I was in law…

  • Starfleet Engineers? On Mustafar? Woooo!

    Did Starfleet tender the low bid, or what? Given that we’re talking about a lava refinery (or whatever) that is probably worth millions, you would think a smidgen of redundancy would be built into the system, right? So we’re supposed to just accept that a single swipe with a light-saber through a single console will…

  • Appearance of access

    Here’s something for all you manhole cover lovers (and I know you’re out there, because if you can think of it, it’s out there somewhere): That’s from this vast collection of Japanese manhole covers. I love the idea of making even such a mundane thing as a manhole cover an object of beauty. The Berkeley…

  • Some Fellow Optimists

    If you read Winds Of Change regularly, you may have come across the work of John Atkinson. He’s the fellow who compiles their monthly feature “New Energy Currents”and he makes a pretty good job of it too. I haven’t missed one since he started them and they have never yet failed to put me on…

  • Political Humor

    From the pages of Mossback Culture comes this must see piece of visual persuasion. Please press here. Do it now. Personally, I’m not too keen on either side. It is kind of funny though. This bit from Tom McClintock is good too… Across California, children are bringing home notes warning of dire consequences if Gov.…

  • Knives cause crime…. (And hate?)

    For many years I have heard Second Amendment supporters ridicule gun control opponents by calling for kitchen knife control — a concept so absurd on its face that the analogy should send liberal gun grabbers scurrying back to the drawing board. I now see that in England (which has had total gun control for years),…

  • Unconsciously defensive?

    I’m in a quandary. I don’t know whether blogging is interfering with my life or whether life is interfering with my blogging. The more I ponder this question, the more unanswerable it seems. I had a very unsettling dream about a blogger who because of an accident of birth, turned out to have two right…

  • Art to die for?

    I’ve been incredibly busy and incredibly absent, both mentally and physically. Yesterday I accompanied guests to see the Dal? exhibit for the second time, which was good, because there’s so much there I had to hurry through the last half of the exhibit the last time. I mean the first time, because the first time…

  • Some illustrations of tyranny

    David Neiwert recently left a comment to a post I wrote last week, which touched on the hate crime issue. Because I try to at least make a stab at being fair (possibly a bad idea in blogging) and I’m afraid readers might miss it, I thought it should be addressed in a new post.…

  • Pilots Of The Purple Twilight

    The Speculist has sometimes asked the question, ?Where?s my flying car?? So has the Instapundit. What kind of a second-rate 21st century doesn?t even have flying cars? I can tell you what kind. One with diminished expectations. Certain grim, gray, cheerless souls would have us believe that Jetson-like mobility is a hubristic industrial-age fantasy, foredoomed…

  • Carrying the culture war too far?

    It just figures that not long after I stood up for the right of Americans to keep and bear prosthetic penises, the penis control people would provoke me by deliberately running this sexed-up story about a prosthetic penis which allegedly caused highway chaos. Suspicious package indeed: Device that forced I-75 and Daniels shut was a…