{"id":657,"date":"2006-09-07T14:50:03","date_gmt":"2006-09-07T18:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/09\/07\/a-thursday-miscellany-2\/"},"modified":"2006-09-09T21:21:40","modified_gmt":"2006-09-10T01:21:40","slug":"a-thursday-miscellany-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/07\/a-thursday-miscellany-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Thursday Miscellany"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Wow. Moore wasn&#8217;t kidding. LOST GIRLS is really, really, dirty.<\/li>\n<li>You know what really gets me about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/canada\/montreal\/story\/2006\/09\/05\/qc-hasidicprayeronplane.html?ref=rss\">this story<\/a>: people were complaining! Who seriously feels threatened on an airplane because someone is praying&#8211;regardless of what language they are doing it in? I thought this kind of madness was American-only, but I guess we&#8217;re just as bad.<\/li>\n<li>My home office is &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.codinghorror.com\/blog\/archives\/000666.html\">Programmer&#8217;s Bill Of Rights<\/a>&#8220;-compliant. I wonder to what extent the same thing would be true if I actually worked in one of the company offices? Certainly the chair would suck compared to what I have, and it would be much less quiet. Oh, and the internet connection would be fast, but restricted to only certain company-approved sites.<\/li>\n<li>Did you know Wikipedia has a whole section on &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Films_considered_the_worst_ever\">Films considered the worst ever<\/a>&#8220;? Quite an entertaining read. I&#8217;ve only seen one of the B-movies they list, and two of the ones in the &#8220;Stars&#8221; category. (Incidentally, Battlefield Earth should be in a different category of badness&#8211;Travolta was far from the only thing wrong with that movie.) In the other categories I have a lot more &#8220;hits&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Any understanding of economics over the last century has to include some understanding of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Milton_Friedman\">Milton Friedman<\/a>. You don&#8217;t have to agree with his premises, or all of his conclusions&#8211;I certainly don&#8217;t!&#8211;but you can&#8217;t be part of the discussion if his ideas are completely unknown to you. This is true of lots of other economists, of course, but I mention Friedman specifically since his PBS series <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Free_to_Choose\">Free To Choose<\/a> is <a href=\"http:\/\/miltonfriedman.blogspot.com\/\">available for free on Google Video<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Who knew there was so much to say about <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Emoticon\">emoticons<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li>On oldie, but still a goodie: &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.times.spb.ru\/index.php?action_id=2&#038;story_id=18178\">Putin said he viewed mysterious forces with suspicion and advised those who took them seriously to read the Bible, Koran or other religious books.<\/a>&#8221; Yes, that&#8217;s right, the Russian President thinks reading religious books will stop Cthulhu. He&#8217;s in for a surprise. I bet he&#8217;ll wish he had those giant robots that day.<\/li>\n<li>I guess I&#8217;m a &#8220;fan&#8221; of both Comsky and Zinn, but I still found this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcsweeneys.net\/2003\/04\/22fellowship.html\">Lord Of The Rings commentary gag<\/a> pretty damn funny. Even when I was being pissed off at the not-to-subtle portrayal of the two of them as apologists for an obviously evil regime who cast blame on the undeserving heroes, I was still having a laugh.<\/li>\n<li>You don&#8217;t need to understand Vietnamese to grasp the beauty of these incredible works of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.giaitrivietnam.net\/?showtopic=4024\">paper cut<\/a>&#8221; art.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.c4vct.com\/kym\/humor\/analog.htm\">John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.<\/a>&#8220;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Wow. Moore wasn&#8217;t kidding. LOST GIRLS is really, really, dirty. You know what really gets me about this story: people were complaining! Who seriously feels threatened on an airplane because someone is praying&#8211;regardless of what language they are doing it in? I thought this kind of madness was American-only, but I guess we&#8217;re just as bad. My home office is&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/07\/a-thursday-miscellany-2\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkapalooza","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-aB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}