Erdos Had The Number First

But it’s not. A Canadian girl frickin DIED when her boyfriend kissed her. He had, nine hours before, eating peanut butter on his toast. BBC NEWS | Americas | Girl dies in peanut butter kiss
She, it seems, had a startlingly severe peanut allergy. She went into Anaphylaxis, and then died. Now I’m afraid of peanuts.

I even have proof.

I don’t know how it happend. I think at some point in Bschool I just realized that I don’t want to buy anything, or sell anything, or process anything. Ocaml, programming language of the future.

Richard Pryor died this weekend. He was not the funniest man who ever lived. He made a series of poor career moves and bad life choices that left him and his 8 marriages and 7 children the worse for wear.

An Authentic Life: Richard Pryor’s Official Biography

But he accomplished things that few could even dream of. As a pioneer in the entertainment industry, he was not a caricature player nor a minstrel. He inspired many people of color to pursue acting and comedy and proved to the world that funny transcends skin color.

He said painful things and made people laugh about it. He was a man of conviction and talented writer. He reclaimed the N-word and then ,after a trip to Africa, vowed to never use it again. These are things few people know about him.

He had suffered from MS for many years, and the disease had taken him out of the limelight. Now it has taken him out of the light completely. Like many pioneers, the road he blazed has become a highway. This highway, often traveled but seldom considered, is merely one aspect of his legacy. Even though he said that “We are all born the same”, his life showed that, clearly, some of us are not.

I googled my own name tonight. This is an exercise in angst that I don’t recommend anyone try. However, I realized as the 800 Quadrillion matching pages that came back: I must change my name. I figure I’ve got about two days to do it before my wife’s RSS feed of this blog catches up and she sees this, but by then, her husband Karl B’Klalat will be able to explain things to her.

It snowed here today. They put dirt on it.

Let me try to explain to you the horror (ok, well, horror is way to strong a word, but you get the idea. Maybe disbelief) when I stepped out onto the landing this morning and saw some guy (bundled up like a outdoor worker in Minsk) trying to shovel less than an inch of snow and then (wait for it) he put dirt on it.

Why? Why? Why? Why do these people insist on doing stupid things? It does snow here sometimes, they should know how to handle it. But they just don’t seem to. No, they would rather send a crew out with shovels and dirt than put out a little bit of salt. Given that they just discovered underground ice on Mars maybe this is the explanation? The martians didn’t know what to do about snow either, no wonder they died off.

SALT! I say. Not dirt.

There is a dangerous poem out there folks. It had to be removed from textbooks in Pakistan because it (as the Guardian reports) is a Veiled ode to George Bush .

The text of it is kinda funny, and notice that the first letter of each sentence spells “President Bush”.

Here is the text of the poem, written by an anonymous poet and entitled The Leader

Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to accept every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real,
Isn’t afraid to propose what is bold,
Doesn’t conform to the usual mold,
Eyes that have foresight, for hindsight wont do
Never back down when he sees what is true
Tells it all straight, and means it all too
Bracing for war, but praying for peace
Using his power so evil will cease:
So much a leader and worthy of trust,
Here stands a man who will do what he must

Besides being a really crappy poem, it is a very interesting thing for political reasons. Especially when you consider the White House has been accused (but I don’t think ever convicted) of propaganda mongering. This poem seems pretty innocuous as propaganda (though as poetry is dreadful). It reads like a campaign volunteer had some free time, wrote this, posted it on the internet and now, forever will it live in Infamy.

I’m writing my own President Bush poem too, though I think my President Clinton poem will be funnier. These structure poems are harder to write than they appear, and even though the first one is crappy I think the genre will flourish.

So, I’m probably going to lose my Liberal Card for this (I know, you always knew we carried cards) but WHAT THE CRAP IS MoveON DOING?

The (venerable?) Chicago Tribune, reporting that it was planning some layoffs
Chicago Tribune | Tribune plans layoffs; fewer than 100 `likely’

is being petitioned by MoveOn

to not do this because

This means watered-down coverage of local, state and national news. Politicians and corporations who should be held accountable by vigilant watchdog journalism will instead be covered by a staff that is stretched too thin.

M’kay. I don’t think they’ve read the Tribune in a while. The Ol’Trib is not a vigilant watchdog of anything but their own profitability. Tribune Media is not whatever MoveOn thinks they are. They go on to say

“The key for us is to get people to recognize that the Tribune’s business model is at fundamental odds with a good journalism model,” he said. “We want to bring more public attention on these cuts and slow the trend, to bring them more in line with a good journalism model.”

Like Vicini in the Princess Bride, they keep using these words, but I do not think they mean what they think they mean.

The problem is that newspapers are not making money. If MoveOn really wants to save jobs, they should buy newspapers. Understand this: NO ONE CARES ABOUT NEWSPAPERS!

The worst part about this is that I happen to agree with MoveOn that a weakened press is a danger to democracy in this country. The fact that we, the citizenry, has weakened the press ourselves is a saddening fact. It is, however, a fact that petitions are not going to change. You cannot alter economic reality with this kind of speech. Buy ads, or Buy papers, don’t send petitions.

I think one of the main problems with bloging is the lack of context. You can read my posts, but often I will not really provide any context to what the discussion I’m having really is.

It’s more like reading peoples letters than reading someones journal. It is not like a journal largely because it is meant to be read by others. Journals are often not really meant to be read by others. While there are those who want their journals to be read, by and large a journaler is writing for themselves. Blogs, on the countrary, are to be read by others. In fact, not having your blog read is a sign that you are unpopular or unintersting.

But back to my original point: given that blogs are meant to be read by others there is a problem in that so many blogs lack context that allow them to be read by those who are really other. Sure, if you know me, you can read almost all of my blog entries and they will, within reason, make sense. If you don’t know me, however, some of the will most certainly not.

This lack of context is a real problem for me when the world has begun to view blogs in a more serious light. Bloggers are now journalists in some instances. I think I would prefer that the whole idea of blogging be removed from a special case of writing and treated more like traditional publishing. We are already (as Americans, at least) comfortable in using our feelings about publishers to color or desire to read a given work.

If we do this, then no-context blogs will be finally reduced to what they are: bad writing. Like this, for example.

I found two things cleaning out that box, a cigarette case and a library card from college. It’s funny what looking at this old stuff will do to your head. Or maybe it was last night’s pizza but
I woke up at 4:30 to a vomitting cat (that little bugger’s been eating plastic again) and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

Which was probably for the best since I’d been awakened from dream about Mastadons. I figure that there are few things worse than dreaming of long-extinct animals, especially mastadons. Especially Mastadons.

Mastadons, as you may know, are native to the midwest. Now that I’m living in the Atlantic region, I suspect that dreaming about extinct midwestern elephants is probably a bad sign.

Either that or I’ve been listing to Cake a bit too much.

Space Raiders (1983)

One of the worst movies ever made. If you get a chance you’ve got to see this film. I remember seeing this movie, since I saw it when it came out (or shortly thereafter). I was about 10, and the movie was about a 10 year old who was kidnapped by aliens and had a wild adventure.

What 10 year old doesn’t want to get kidnapped by aliens? The only concern I have is that this movie, like Ice Pirates, does not hold its magic when viewed as an adult. I suspect some stories are better remembered than retold.