Archive for June, 2006

I have too many fillings.

Friday, June 30th, 2006

You know, I’ve always expected to see a couple of things in my lifetime: a cure for baldness and a way to scientifically regrow teeth.
For both of those, I expected the solution to be some kind of biological one–we would trick the body into regrowing these things the same way it had grown them in [...]

Go SCOTUS

Friday, June 30th, 2006

This post made possible by the New Medievalism research team.
I was pretty surprised today at the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hamadan–I honestly didn’t expect this court to deny Bush anything, much less make a decent ruling.
Here’s a snippet from the AP story:
Supreme Court blocks Bush, Gitmo war trials
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Thursday [...]

Dreamland by Edgar Allan Poe

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

…because I’m just in the sort of mood where I spend several hours thinking about a poem, and writing a ridiculously long post about it. I’m even feeling contrary enough to leave the whole damn thing without a “more” break in it.
Dreamland
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon1, named NIGHT,
On [...]

I still like most of Appetite For Destruction. I admit it.

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

BBC NEWS:Rocker Rose arrested in Stockholm
Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose has been arrested in Sweden for alleged violent conduct and damage to a hotel room.
Rose is alleged to have bitten a security guard in the leg outside the Berns Hotel, in Stockholm.
Two thoughts on reading this story:
1) Axl is not aging well. And I [...]

Hanging Around The House 8: The Upstairs Halls

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Continuing the series of posts that try to capture the various pieces of art I have hanging around the house. Remember that these posts are made up of quick snapshots–these are hardly professional images, and the upstairs images are worse than the downstairs ones since the angles I could use to take the snapshots are [...]

Links to a cornucopia of images

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Keith Loh’s Flickr photoset of images from the World Peace Forum’s Peace March. Keith’s captions are a lot more useful than on most Flickr photosets.
A gallery of cool science-fiction landscapes conjured from TerraGen. (The site’s main page is in German. Here’s another.)
If you think hookers look like this, then you’re in for a rude awakening.
Another [...]

Butter Sculpture as Novel Inspiration?

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

For many years now I’ve been polishing my story about driving across America to take a friend’s car to San Francisco. The story has everything: Monet in Chicago, parties at the Renn Fest outside Minneapolis and a day at the Minnesota State Fair, the Shetterly tour of Weird America (Corn Palace, Wall Drug, Crazy Horse [...]

B’n'E Cleaner

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

Look what happens when English majors go unemployed in the age of desktop video…

(Speedbag is a member of the HGPA. He doesn’t know that I know his door code. However, I certainly didn’t put his dishes away–hell, it’s a constant battle in my own house to get me to put away the dishes.)

Hanging Around The House 7: Family Room

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

Continuing the series of posts that try to capture the various pieces of art I have hanging around the house. Remember that these posts are made up of quick snapshots–these are hardly professional images, and the upstairs images are worse than the downstairs ones since the angles I could use to take the snapshots are [...]

Father’s Day

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

Well, my second Father’s Day was pretty great. Sarah was, obviously, much more interactive this year; she actually said “Happy Father’s Day” to me. It was so cute it nearly broke my heart. And then she gave me a present:

Space Frogs in the hizouse!
Yes, that is a giant bibb. One reading of this gift would [...]

Bipolar linking

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

Chris is Angry: “Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely“. Almost nothing in “rights” legality angers me more than divisions between the rights of humans and the rights of citizens. The judge here, and anyone who agrees with him should learn a little history. The line was “We hold these truths [...]

Saints preserve us.

Friday, June 16th, 2006

This news is so wrong. So wrong.
Almost as wrong as this. And that is saying something.

Two pointless anecdotes, with pictures…

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

First, can I just say that I have a vague memory of what the sun looked like. What is this, the nineteenth consecutive day of rain? Madness.
It has rained so much that the grass seed Sarah spilled on the driveway ages ago has been able to germinate, sprout, and grow to over an inch in [...]

Markup Languages & Politics

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

Because one of my job roles is keeping on eye on some markup language specifications that are relevant to our product line (hell, I even helped author the initial version of one of the ones that’s important to us).
Mostly this means I have to occasionally subject myself to incredibly boring markup minutiae, but sometimes it [...]

The wilder their claims, the more the debate shifts right…

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

Okay, let’s review.
First, three prisoners at Guantamao commit suicide.
Then the camp commander of the camp, Read Adm Harris, where this happened is quoted as saying this suicide is “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us“.
Then we have the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, who we could perhaps assume might actually [...]