Laonastes & Kiwaida

[Updated: Here are two subsequent "furry lobster" posts of mine: "Give 'em what they want" and Kiwaidagain. Hey, it's a popular topic right now, and I'm milking it. Enjoy! ]

It's a red letter day for weird new animal species. There's a story over at FoxNews about the (re)discovery of the Laotian Rock Rat, Laonastes aenigmamus. Or if you prefer reputable sources, there's a Wikipedia article as well. Or if you're a proper Renaissance person and prefer your scientific literature in Latin, you're in luck. And if you're curious what they taste like, NewScientist has the goods. (discusson here) Some accounts I've seen have referred to the little beastie as a "rat squirrel", not to be confused with the Sumatran rat monkey, of course. I can't quite picture that. I love squirrels, and hate rats, and if the new creature is somewhere in between, I just don't know what to think about it.

Deep beneath the sea, another weird creature has been discovered. Kiwa hirsuta is described as a hairy lobster, representing an entirely new family of crustacean, Kiwaida. It's not real hair, of course, but it certainly looks like something the Jim Henson workshop might have cooked up. Here, a blogger wonders how long it'll be before "some jackass wonders what kind of sauce and wine might go best". And here, that question is answered. There's always someone who wants to know what it tastes like.

Meanwhile, today's Washington Post has one of the saddest stories I've seen in a long, long time. The Richmond, VA zoo was forced to euthanize both of their bears so they could be tested for rabies, all because some stupid parent thought it'd be cute to have her kid feed the bears from up close. Chomp! If they ever institute a test that people have to pass in order to become parents, people ought to be asked whether they'd ever voluntarily place their young offspring within reach of a huge, hungry bear. That would be a very reasonable question to ask, I think.

You used to be able to feed the animals at the zoo. It's true. I remember doing it myself as a child, back in the 70's, but not from up close. We'd make about a loaf's worth of PB&J sandwiches, take them to the local zoo, and hurl them to the bears. I don't know whether the bears had been trained to do this or not, but they'd sit up on their hind legs and beg, and they were pretty good at catching sandwiches out of the air. Decades later, that seems like a really barbaric practice, and I can't believe they ever allowed it. I've heard zoos of that era had persistent problems with pranksters who'd throw the bears sandwiches laced with Ex Lax, for instance. I don't know whether that's true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. People who enjoy abusing animals couldn't resist an opportunity like that.

A couple of additional zoological tidbits:

In the UK there's a charity dedicated to protecting squishy, spineless little invertebrates. Not congressional Democrats, silly, they're for protecting bugs.

And here's the ultimate answer to every kid's favorite question, "What's grosser than gross?". I'm speaking, of course, about the hagfish, a really nasty piece of work. Want more info? Here's more, but I doubt it'll change your mind much.

The first time I ever heard of these little bastards was actually in a Gunter Grass novel. It was years ago, but I think it was either Dog Years or Cat and Mouse. There's a vivid image in one scene of a horse's head being pulled from the ocean, riddled with hagfishes. It was one of those moments where you just know it isn't entirely fictional. Poor Herr Grass probably experienced this as a child, and has had nightmares about it ever since. I know I would've, if it had happened to me.

Various sources out there argue that despite all appearances, hagfish really are of commercial value. The skins are an excellent cheap leather substitute, we're told. And they're considered a delicacy in Korea. Or was it Japan? And here, a group of intrepid college students explores using hagfish slime as an egg substitute in baked goods. And it wasn't even a reality show, that's the real kicker here. If you'd like to try this yourself, and you have access to a reliable supply of hagfish slime (and if you do, I seriously don't want to know why), there's a recipe for hagfish slime scones over at the Museum of Awful Food. Not to be confused with James Lileks' incredibly funny Gallery of Regrettable Food.



I hate to end this post talking about the most disgusting creature on the planet, so let's switch gears again. It seems that via the magic of DNA analysis, researchers have identified three new species of lemur in Madagascar, including the Lepilemur randrianasoli pictured above. This has gotten less coverage than the other stories, probably because the "new" lemurs aren't especially new. They look and act like other lemurs, and were only identified as separate with some fancy DNA work. But still, you'd think someone would be paying attention. I guess that someone is me. There's one other lemur-related story of note: The zoo in Sacramento has a new baby Coquerel's sifaka, a species of lemur. Enjoy!

tags: laonastes kiwaida bear hagfish gunter grass lemur madagascar zoo lobster

When Small Housewares Attack

Maslenitsa-N-More

I really need to pay closer attention to these things. While I was busy working, commuting, blogging, going to the grocery store, attending wedding receptions, and so forth, the festival of Maslenitsa (a.k.a. Russian Mardi Gras) passed completely unremarked-upon. That just isn't right. A few additional accounts, some with images. This is a sample of what I, and probably you, missed:

• Linguamir has some pics of traditional folk dancing and general clowning about. Since the company claims to be "Quality language instruction", I'd like to offer them a bit of of constructive criticism. In English, referring to a female clown as a "girl-buffoon" isn't very nice at all. You're likely to offend people talking that way.
  
• One of several posts at Moscow Minutiae. At one point the post mentions a honey-based drink called medovukha, which WIkipedia says is a lot like mead. Hmm. Combine that with the folk dancing and such, and you've basically got a Renaissance Fair on your hands.
  
• Another article w/ more images over at Accidental Russophile.
  

Ah, well. There's always next year.

Meanwhile, I still haven't found that link I lost where someone was blogging about Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro. However, here's what may be the next best thing, a blog about Carnaval in Pernambuco, Brazil. Looks like it's all safe for work, albeit maybe a bit distracting.

And St. Patrick's Day will be here soon. So far I haven't seen any signs that there'll be a repeat of last year's beer festival in Pioneer Courthouse Square. We went and loved it, but most of the time we were there the place was deserted. It's almost unimaginable that someone threw a beer festival in Portland and nobody shows up, but that's exactly what happened. I know, because I was there. The thing even got a reasonable amount of publicity, and it didn't help. Maybe everyone who goes to this sort of thing was at the Kells Irish Pub's festival, which is sort of a local institution. It's hard to say. Later it occurred to me that the festival also tied up the square over the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, so part of me wonders if maybe that was the plan all along.

Of course, everybody knows that the really big spring festival here in Portland doesn't come until a bit later. The Spring Beer & Wine Festival doesn't happen until mid-April this time around, because it always runs Easter weekend. It's really tailored to local conditions in ways that traditional festivities aren't. First, it's indoors, which is very important here. Second, it has no religious aspect whatsoever. Third, it's a chance to drink a lot of beer while pretending it's all a big intellectual exercise for discerning conoisseurs, And fourth, there are lots of knicknacks and trinkets you can buy once you've had a few drinks. The next morning you wake up and think "I bought THAT!?". Which can be expensive, but at least nobody's caught an embarrassing disease that way.

At the moment, I'm enjoying a nice glass of Cantillon Geuze, which is a definite acquired taste. Someday I'll figure out whether I actually like lambics or not, and decide once and for all whether they're truly the pinnacle of the brewer's art. But not today. I figure there's no point in forming a concrete opinion until you've tried 'em all.

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And now we've hit the "unrelated items" part of the post, where I list off a few things that I came across today that have nothing to do with the alleged topic of this post.

• Thrilling video from The Lancelet of an octopus eating a shark.
  
• You may have seen this already. A blog out of New Zealand offers a series of pics titled "Bad Parenting", featuring some ducklings. Well, the ducklings appear in two out of the three pics, I'll put it that way.
  
• The Panda's Thumb reports on the current creationism debate in South Carolina, where I used to live a few years ago. I sure miss the weather right about now... And the food. And some of the people, some of the time. Did I mention the food?
  
• In the same vein, here's a great Washington Post column titled Culture of Intellectual Corruption. I'll just tell you flat-out that it's about Bush, so that you don't have to waste your 6 guesses. One key point it makes is something I've tried to explain here on occasion:
  

  
  Specter is right to link Iraq with everything else, because the debacle there is a product of the same magical thinking that rejected global warming, stem cells and condoms alike. Underlying it all is a commitment to belief over fact, what should be over what is. It is evidenced in the insistence by Bush and others that "intelligent design" is, like evolution, worthy of teaching. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," Bush once said. Yes, and astronomy and astrology, too, and maybe chemistry and alchemy as well. It's a totally bogus proposition.
  

  
  
• A travel blog, from someone who's trekking around Argentina even as we speak.
  
• Whaddaya Say Fritz, another interesting photo blog,
  
• love of robots, in which a 15 y/o student posts her many doodles involving robots. This is quite possibly the most excellent blog ever, but don't ask me to try explaining why. It just is, ok?
  

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and now, the tags: maslenitsa mardi gras beer carnaval south carolina bush lambic octopus robot

Plugh!!!

In a recent post, I made a crack about hypothetical tourists from Idaho Falls. This generated a surprising number of search engine hits, all people looking for the phrase "Idaho Falls". It seems the world, or at least part of the world, is thirsting for information about the place, so I figured, hey, I've been there twice, the last time less than ten years ago, so that practically makes me an expert, compared to a lot of people. So I figured I'd see what I could find about the place with a few brief minutes searching the web.

Two very different perspectives on the place can be had from the the local ABC affiliate, and IdahoFallz.com, which describes itself as the city's "virtual soapbox". While the former is the usual local TV mix of lurid crime stories and human interest fluff, the latter is a fairly interesting read. Some urban planning stories, pictures of local architecture and public art, and so forth. Also, the city has a brand new TGI Fridays.

So I ought to make it very clear that the picture above does not have anything whatsoever to do with United Airlines starting a new route from Idaho Falls to Denver. Nor does it have anything to do with a recent incident that got the hardcore "chemtrail" folks all worked up. (Silly rabbit, everybody knows chemtrails are made by black helicopters.)

No, the above picture isn't from Idaho at all, surprisingly enough. It's from Southern Oregon, home of the Oregon Caves. Certain local booster clubs in the area have been known to dress up as cavemen, er, cavepersons. The city of Grants Pass actually has a statue of a caveman, right near the freeway offramp. I suppose it's located there to ward away any Californians who wander in off I-5, desperately seeking tofu.

The picture is in a gallery hosted by the Oregon Grotto, a local spelunking organization. I haven't done a lot of wandering around in caves myself. Mostly because there aren't a lot of caves in the area (that the public knows about, anyway), and most of what we do have are lava tubes, like Lava River Cave. Not very big, and once you've seen one, the others hold few surprises.

But I have always liked the idea of caves, at least. When I was a kid, I found a book in the local library called The Longest Cave, an account of the exploration of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. It's been years since I last read it, but I remember it being an engrossing and very well written book. As it turns out, one of the people who features prominently in the book went on to write the famous original Adventure computer game, which was based (rather realistically, we're told) on part of the cave system. I used to love that game too, having played it incessantly back in the old text adventure days. The game, incidentally, is the origin of the magic words "xyzzy" and the lesser-known "plugh", and the phrase "a maze of twisty little passages, all alike".

I actually came across these cave pics when I was, once again, looking for a good picture of a Cyclotram to adorn this blog. Still haven't found one, but I came across someone who saw Unknown World as a child, and apparently loved it. He mentions the movie in two separate columns, one about being a lifelong SF fan, and the other some memories about someone he knew who'd gotten stuck in a cave when he was younger, requiring a somewhat embarrassing rescue.

I also came across a site offering the movie via BitTorrent, with some small screenshots to give you some idea of what to expect. The site asserts that the film's entered the public demain and is no longer under copyright. I don't know whether that's the case or not, but it's not unusual for this to happen with B movies from that era. So maybe I can just grab a screenshot from my dvd of the movie, if that's the case.

tags: idaho falls cave book xyzzy plugh oregon

On Importance

More evidence surfaced today that a.) what I'm doing right now (i.e. blogging) is Very Important, but b.) my particular instance of this worthy activity is Not Very Important. I remain a remote vertex on the far fringes of the blogoverse's vast directed graph, with my indegree stuck resolutely at zero.

Here are a couple of news stories from much closer to the center of the graph, pointing at what we're told are hip, happening bits of the blogosphere, directly from various stodgy corners of the Old Media. Because if anyone knows what's hip and happening at this very moment, it's the Old Media. Everybody knows that.

The BBC would like us to know all about something called the Blooker Prize, by analogy with the UK's "old media" Booker Prize. Soon, the world's best blog will be anointed, and the author given a golden opportunity to leap to the world of dead trees and lead-based ink. Yay!

Closer to home, Portland's own Willamette Week has a trend/style article that puts local bloggers on notice: You're nobody, unless your blog's hosted on UrbanHonking. If you (like me) use Blogspot or some other service, you're a hopeless square. If you aren't l33t enough to have a blog on UH, you might as well give up on the whole internet thing and go back to making buggy whips. I'd actually never even heard of the thing before, but then I also have a huge amount of trouble keeping up on the local indie rock scene, too. Which is too bad, because you can't possibly be cool in this town unless you can list from memory at least 3 dozen bands nobody else on the planet has ever heard of. And they all have to be exactly the right sort of band, too. No country-western, no hair metal, no 60's style soul music. Just 100% pure indie rock, and lots of it. Yay. And while I'm at it, stop calling me "Gramps", dammit.

And then, there's the matter of Wal-Mart recruiting friendly bloggers to help polish their image. It's surprising how many Wal-Mart-friendly bloggers there are out there. Apparently a large chunk of the conservative (and/or venal money-grubbing) blogosphere genuinely belives that Wal-Mart's "red state" image is a real expression of ideology on the company's part, and is absolutely not a coldly calculated marketing campaign like what Target's managed on the "blue state" side of things. Whew. Talk about naive.

The really important point here is that, to date, not a single "old media" type has pretended to fawn over my every word, and not one corporate flack has, so far, dangled schwag in front of me in exchange for my considerable literary services. It's quite the crying shame, although I remain convinced they're all doing it just to make me jealous.

New Dawn Fades

If you care about this sort of thing, you've probably already heard about NASA cancelling the Dawn mission to the large asteroids Ceres and Vesta. We're told this was because the troubled project was over budget, which was true, and because it was stumbling over a number of technical obstacles, which was also true. And what's more, the whole point of the Discovery program (which Dawn was funded under) is to control costs and make it easy to terminate projects that go off the rails. So in a sense this shows that HQ means business, and the cost control provisions really do mean what they say. From a purely bureaucratic perspective, then, I guess one could declare "mission accomplished", although the result is that we don't get to see two fascinating places up close, at least for a while longer.

On the other hand, the mission's complexity was due in large part to the need to accomodate various bureaucratic requirements. In particular, the idea of sending one spacecraft to visit both asteroids surely resulted from the Discovery program's focus on funding individual stand-alone missions. You probably couldn't build multiple asteroid probes on a Discovery budget, while a proposal to visit a single large asteroid probably wouldn't have been flashy enough to get the bid committee's attention. Visiting two asteroids meant using not one but two ion engines, and an extremely long mission duration. Even before HQ started cracking the whip a few months ago, the mission was clearly in trouble. News accounts about the cancellation mentioned that the mission would have measured the asteroids' magnetic fields (if they exist), but Dawn's magnetometer had been deleted from the mission back in February 2004, to save on costs, weight, and power consumption, all of which had grown significantly over the original estimate.

The fundamental problem is that, unlike Mars for example, the asteroid belt isn't all in one place. There are far too many to ever contemplate visiting all of them, so the right approach would seem to be to get a statistically significant sample. Cover the really big ones, plus enough hopefully-typical examples that one or two oddballs won't skew your conclusions. This inevitably means building more than one spacecraft. The best you can really do, costwise, is try to leverage your initial investment by using a standardized, simple design. This would be the right approach, but I doubt there's enough political will or interest out there to do it this way.

There's also the matter of agency priorities. We've gotten a solemn promise that science programs will absolutely not be cannibalized in favor of Apollo Jr., the latest bloated and pointless federal jobs-for-Texans program. But nobody really believes that. It's happening already, in fact. Which is exactly the same thing that happened with the Space Station, the Shuttle, and on and on. To justify this, we're always told that human spaceflight is the one and only thing the public cares about. This may have been true in 1965, but it's hard to argue that it's the case anymore. These days the Shuttle+Station program is seen as expensive, pointless, and scary, and the public couldn't care less about it. In contrast, thanks to the magic of the Internet, the public can follow ongoing planetary exploration in near-real-time. It's almost like riding along.

This wouldn't be as big of a problem if it was possible to grow the NASA budget to accomodate the new moon program. But we can't, because our top budgetary priorities remain 1.) Apocalyptic wars all over the Middle East -- and everywhere else, if possible; and 2.) More big tax cuts for rich people. So our hands are pretty much tied, budgetwise. This is strikingly similar to the situation that eventually killed the Apollo program, come to think of it.

But there may be more at work here than budgetary & bureaucratic infighting. Beyond Dawn, other major cuts included projects to explore Jupiter's moon Europa (which may contain a vast ocean of liquid water under its icy crust), and an effort to look for earthlike planets around other stars. Even more than Dawn, evidence resulting from these projects would have the potential to really undermine a fundamentalist, literal reading of Genesis. So now we simply aren't going to study that sort of thing anymore, to make sure that we don't discover anything Karl Rove and the creationist/ID rabble wouldn't approve of. You think I'm kidding? Read my previous post about the infamous Big Bang Memo, and then decide whether I'm just blowing smoke here.

On the bright side, we don't have a monopoly on exploring the universe. If we're going to turn inward and wallow in medieval ignorance, someone else (Europe, Russia, Japan, China, India...) will happily pick up the slack, and get all the credit while we busy ourselves speaking in tongues and burning witches at the stake.

[In case you're wondering, the title of the post comes from an old Joy Division song, which is not to say that I'm that old or anything, of course.]

tags: nasa dawn ceres vesta shuttle apollo discovery europa creationism "intelligent design"

Greenhorn, USA

The smallest, and highest altitude, incorporated city in Oregon is named Greenhorn, at 6270 feet above sea level, and a population that various measures give as anywhere from three down to zero. The last census recorded zero residents, although there are apparently three registered voters, a mayor, a city council, and a couple of city "employees". As far as I can figure, the state can't classify it as a ghost town and abolish it so long as someone's maintaining it as a going concern. Although several pages including this one report that the place operates under some sort of "Township Charter" granted directly by Uncle Sam. It'd be helpful if they explained what that meant, but they don't.

The town gets a blurb at the end of this article about "Oregon's Playgrounds", meaning areas where a significant percentage of the housing stock is owned by nonresidents and occupied seasonally. If any of the seven legal residences are vacation homes, I'm assuming they aren't pictured on this page.

I suppose it would be kind of fun to have an actual legal city to run as a hobby. It's a shame how ghost towns tend to be so inconveniently located, though. I do seem to recall an article in the Oregonian a few years ago where a sharp-eyed researcher had discovered that there were a significant number of "cities" on the books in this state that had been incorporated on paper long ago, and subsequently forgotten. Many of these were near, or now even within the limits of "real" cities, some of them in the Portland area. If I'm not mistaken, one phantom city was actually centered in the area of what's now the Cedar Hills Crossing mall in central Beaverton. Which is kind of a fascinating idea. The idea of things continuing to legally "exist" on paper long after they've ceased to exist (or never existed to begin with) in the real world is intriguing, and I expect there are all sorts of ways a sufficiently clever person could turn such a situation to his or her advantage.

I don't know if the state legislature ever acted on these legal "ghost towns"; surely they must've had higher priorities. Unless they've since been abolished, in theory I guess you could lay hands on one of these babies, finagle yourself into the mayor's office, and start handing out traffic tickets, putting relatives on the payroll, passing weird city ordinances, accepting lavish gifts from lobbyists, abusing your city credit card / mobile phone / Learjet for personal use, handing out huge public subsidies for local sports team owners, CEOs, and random other rich people, maybe build a stylish aerial tram across "town"... the possibilities are absolutely endless, and just begging to be exploited. (Mwhahahaha!!!!)

Which means our noble legislators probably did abolish these cities-on-paper. I don't think they could tolerate the added competition.

Columbia River Crystal

I've gone off on the occasional rant about awful public art from time to time, so I thought it was high time I featured something that I actually like. This is Columbia River Crystal, by David Curt Morris, a New York sculptor who just happens to have grown up in Portland. Even graduated from Reed. I'm not saying that out of small-town boosterism, but it is kind of a neat bit of trivia.

Updated 11/12/08: I've always reserved the right to go back and update old posts if I've got something more to add on the subject, and this post was overdue for a little tweaking. In particular, when I wrote this I didn't have the whole Flickr thing sorted out yet, so I used a photo I found on the net somewhere. I'm not real big on doing that anymore, so I'm replacing it with a bunch of artsy-esque photos I took recently. If these don't float your boat, here are two photos I ran across out on the interwebs. Hmm. Was "interwebs" even a word when I wrote this originally? Is it a word now?

Forgive me if the post rambles off topic a bit toward the end. I used to do that a lot. At least the new photos are all "on topic". Well, whatever. On with our story...

Why do I like it? Reasonable people can disagree about this, of course, but I think it's beautiful, and it fits its location perfectly. The only downside is that its location is fairly obscure, at the entrance to the Crown Plaza office complex on the south end of downtown, near the corner of 1st and Clay. You either have to know it's there and go in search of it, or you have to walk around in the area a lot and eventually stumble across it, which is what I did.

The really encouraging thing is that it's a recent piece, installed in 1997. I'm not really hip to current trends in the art world, but I'd like to believe that abstract sculpture is improving over time, with this being a recent(-ish) example, and the infamous "Rusting Chunks No. 5" a.k.a "Leland One" representing a primitive, bygone era.

On my TODO list, there are two more downtown artworks I mean to track down when I get a chance. I've heard there's a neat little fountain in the underground parking garage of the ultra-mod 60's Union Bank of California Tower. And a few weeks ago I was driving past one of the new engineering buildings at Portland State University, and noticed what appeared to be the "parking garage pillar" thingy I mentioned in the Rusting Chunks post. I thought it had been demolished to make way for the new CS building, but maybe they just moved it instead. If true, that would be a serious crying shame.

While searching for info on the UBC Tower's fountain, I came across an fascinating blog entry mentioning the building itself, from the local blog anti:freeze. The building also features on this list of the best buildings in town.

Also came across pics of two smallish fountains in town that I've never personally seen or heard of. I gather the second one is somewhere near the lower reservoir in Washington Park, but I couldn't begin to guess where it might be located.

Yet another interesting post that wasn't quite what I was looking for. The "Cool flower planter" item toward the bottom looks like it's at Lovejoy Fountain Plaza. The author complains the area seems deserted, especially during off-hours. Which is true, but in this case I think it's great. I've always thought of this park as a sort of modernist secret oasis in the middle of the city, known only to those who live or work or go to school in the area. And really I'm just fine with it staying that way, especially now that tourist-filled streetcars are running just a block or two away. If only they knew, they could stop, and gawk, and loudly tell each other how there isn't anything quite like this back home in Idaho Falls, and drop their gum and cigarette butts everywhere, and pester the locals with stupid questions, and demand to know where they can buy tourist knicknacks, maybe snowglobes with the fountain inside or something, or cheap his-n-hers size XXXXXL t-shirts with pictures of the fountain on 'em, and maybe a tasmanian devil too, just to spice things up. But luckily it's not in the guidebook, so they don't have a clue it's there. For now, it's our little secret.

tags: portland sculpture fountain public art

Conquest!!!

I've just seen an exceedingly crappy movie, and I'd like to share it with you. In a recent post about sword & sorcery movies, I made a brief mention of Conquest, by the infamous Italian director Lucio Fulci. It arrived today, by the grace of Netflix and the US Postal Service, and... wow, it's really poor, a terrible, terrible movie.

Before I get to my own comments, here are some other reviews, so you can get a diverse set of opinions about the film and all. From the website names alone (other than Amazon, perhaps), it's obvious that the Merchant-Ivory mafia holds no sway here. Several of the reviewers are horror fans who think the director's normally a genius, except perhaps for this movie. Even the most harcore fanboys can't make this one look good:

• Horrorview
  
• Sleazegrinder
  
• Amazon.com
  
• Monsters at Play
  
• braineater.com
  
• Tyrannorabbit
  

And now for a few comments of my own:

1. I've never seen so much fog in my entire life. Is it supposed to be artistic? Or did somebody's no-good brother need a job, and the only thing he could do was run a fog machine? Enough with the fog, already. It's true that a proper S&S movie needs a bit of fog machine work here and there, but not every freakin' scene. Certain Fulci apologists have tried to blame the movie's appearance on a bad video or DVD transfer, but it's obvious that there was fog in the original scene.
   
2. The score is suitably cheesy. It's one scene after another of some dork noodling away on a synthesizer. One mentally associates 80's fantasy movies with heavy metal music, but I don't recall actually seeing the two combined on film. It's always synthesizers. And at least in this department, The Conquest delivers.
   
3. If there's a moral to the story, which I doubt, it's that being able to see the future is more trouble than it's worth. The evil sorceress forsees her own demise at the hands of one of the two heroes, and everything from there is all self-fulfilling prophecy. Basically she decides that some guy in a distant land is a threat to her, because he has a WMD (a magic bow, in this case), and sends her minions out on a preemptive attack to deal with him. Sound familiar? Does this ever turn out well?
   
4. If we're going to be genre sticklers, there are no actual swords in this movie. One guy has a magic bow, the other has a sling, plus some special rocks that explode when you toss them in people's campfires. The bad guys don't seem to have mastered tool use (probably couldn't, in those costumes), and rely on a bit of listless wrestling and occasional tossing of nets.
   
5. You couldn't pay me enough to do the scene where the older guy's tied to a pole underwater, and he's rescued by a pair of dolphins that bite the ropes away from his wrists. The next time you see a dolphin, look at all those teeth. You couldn't pay me enough. Yikes!
   
6. Not to spoil things, but the film does pull a switcheroo on viewers as to which guy will be the sole conquering hero in the end. You think it's one, but it's the other. I'm not telling which.
   
7. There's a bit of gore here, but it's not exactly high-quality gore. Unless the natives of these weird and foggy lands have Campbell's tomato soup for blood.
   
8. The evil high priestess spends the whole movie wearing just a spiky g-string and a gold mask, plus the occasional boa constrictor. If I'd seen this movie when I was 15 or so and impressionable, I might've ended up with some really odd notions.
   
9. However, everybody keeps saying the movie's full of sex and violence, and it isn't, at least not by S&S standards. She alone accounts for about 90% of the movie's t&A. And not to be crude or anything, but that 't' is lowercase for a reason, if you get my drift.
   
10. Like any S&S "buddy" movie, there's an obvious gay subtext to the movie, but as usual the movie doesn't pull it off very well. There's no real chemistry between the older and younger guy. It's almost as if the director wasn't aware of this theme, despite all the loincloths and furry boots.
    
11. Also, the young guy is really scrawny, and the older guy is, well, older, and kind of stubbly. Neither takes his shirt off in the whole movie, which may not be a bad thing. So the movie really falls down in the beefcake department. I like to think I'm an egalitarian sort of person, so if the women in S&S movies are going to be objectified, the men ought to be as well. It's only fair.
    
12. I don't think Fulci liked dogs very much. The sorceress's lackeys are weird dog-faced creatures, and she and the faceless male(?) being that arrives to help her out halfway through both are able to transform into dogs. None of this is ever explained, of course.
    
13. People spend a lot of time sleeping in this movie. I don't know why. Tsetse flies, maybe? It's never explained, but you soon realize that you don't get a lot of action or character development out of sleeping characters, do you? Actually in this movie you don't get a lot of action or character development, period.
    
14. Whenever people aren't sleeping, they're having "dramatic" scenes at what is either sundown or sunup. If you feel like creating a Conquest drinking game, you might want to start out with "If someone tries to emote in front of a sunset or sunrise, drink!", and go from there.
    
15. There's an edgy moment where the older guy kills some random peasant with an arrow and swipes the pig carcass he was carrying. Our heroes then enjoy a hearty pig dinner. The young guy is puzzled because the older guy's supposed to be such a great friend of animals and all. The older guy makes a flippant remark about that, and we never revisit the issue. Hey, he's a barbarian, not a righter of wrongs and defender of the defenseless.
    
16. The blue glowing magic arrow thing isn't a bad effect for 1983. It's the movie's one effect, so it's used over and over again. It's not bad, but you'll be sick of it before long. The bad-guy arrows inexplicably shooting out of a large bush are not such a good effect, and you'll see this one a few times too many as well. I did like the way our heroes endure a few minutes of these cheesy arrow effects, and then turn tail and run away.
    
17. When the young guy ends up getting hit in the leg, we discover that the bad guys use really puny arrows. Not so much arrows as pipe cleaners, in fact. Or maybe pine needles. But these, ahem, arrows are poisoned, so when the young guy gets nicked by one, he ends up with a number of highly unconvincing boils. More tomato soup.
    
18. You can always tell if someone's a peasant, because if so, they're always covered in caked-on mud. Yes, even on their hair. Peasants always have muddy hair, it seems.
    
19. The movie doesn't lack for poorly animated birds and bats. The older guy finds an injured bird of some kind at one point, and once he's nursed it back to health in a day or two, it rejoins the film's other two marionette birds. I guess to heal one of these birds, all you really need to do is reattach the strings, and it's off flying again.
    

So in sum, if you're going to see exactly one S&S movie, see a different one. If you're going to see all S&S movies, you'll have to get around to this one sooner or later, but try some of the classics first, so you have a good handle on the conventions of the genre. Then watch this one just for the sake of completeness. For anyone who doesn't fall into either category, um, I don't know whether to recommend this or not. I'll be happy to recommend it to anyone who agrees not to blame me when they decide they hate the thing.

Writing without a thesis

I'm not happy with this post. I was playing around with Blogspot's "Next Blog" button a few days ago and started collecting various items I ran across, hoping I could massage them all into another sort of "Found Objects" post. The main problem is that I don't really see a common thread among the stuff I collected, and what's more, I don't really have a lot to say about any of it. Even if I did, posting another "random tidbits" post so soon after the last one -- with cute animals in it, no less -- seems like cheating. It's too easy.

I figured that instead of just deleting this post-that-didn't-jell and discarding all of my, uh, hard work, I'd add a lame explanation/apology about how it came to be, and post the damn thing and be done with it. This thing isn't up to my usual high standards, and I'd like to think that other people would notice the difference as well. I'll try to do better next time, probably.

So first off, here are two pictures of cute cats, both of which link to their blogs of origin. I came across these in quick succession, and if I believed in fate I'd blather some nonsense about how I was somehow meant to cover these. Really all this tells us is that cats show up on personal blogs a lot, so the odds of running across two in close succession are pretty reasonable.



Another pseudo-fated item is an interesting blog titled "It's a numeric life", which I actually ran across twice during my little "Next Blog" excursion.

One curious observation: I was surprised by the sheer number of blogs in Portuguese, both from Portugal and Brazil. One I came across discussed (I think) the blogger's recent experiences at Carnaval in Rio. Unfortunately I lost the URL for that one. Probably wouldn't be safe for work anyway.

A small unordered list of other blogs I thought were interesting:

• No More Mister Nice Blog, a good political blog.
  
• studiosavant, a blog maintained by a group of sculptors up in Edmonton. One recent post marvels at the odd sculpture-related news you stumble across when you sign up for Google news alerts on the topic.
  
• TopEnd Tales, a photo blog from Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia.
  
• Food GPS, a food blog apparently from the SF area.
  
• Xooglers, a blog by+for ex-Google employees.
  

Here's the part where I insert a lame joke along the lines of "What rhymes with Xoogle? Koogle, of course". It's supposed to be funny because you'd be thinking "Google", the actual obvious choice, and then I go and spring "Koogle" on you, leaving you wondering what the heck a koogle is. Not a very good joke, is it?

Anyway, I'd go on to note that the Koogle I have in mind is not the "kosher search engine" by that name, but rather a peanut-butter-like concoction from the early 70's, which combined artificial "peanut butter" with various other artificial flavors, like vanilla, chocolate (both pictured below) or my personal favorite, cinnamon. Yes, I actually liked the stuff, I think I was the only person on earth who did, because it soon disappeared from grocery shelves without a trace. I remember meeting the Koogle mascot at a local grocery store, goo-goo-googly eyes and all, and I was heartbroken when my mom explained to me that Koogle was gone and there wasn't going to be any more. That was quite a difficult concept for a small child to grasp. Out of spite, I refused to eat anything containing cinnamon for a good while afterwards, because it wasn't the thing I really wanted.




Finally we get to an editorial cartoon I found, again linking to its blog of origin, which in this case is in Norwegian. I originally had this baby at the top of the page, but today I changed my mind. I think the Jesus-with-a-shotgun thing would give the whole post a sort of sour and shrill tone. I've done a lot of complaining about political and religious nuts lately, and I don't want it to seem as though I'm just droning on and on about it. But still, I think it's an ok cartoon, and here it is.

Evwybody wuvs bunnies

Ok, I threatened to do this a while back. It seems that not everyone loved that picture of a French bulldog puppy I posted. So here a few pics of cute bunnies, because everyone loves bunnies.

Everyone, that is, except Dubya and his evil cronies. See, the first two pics are of the Northwest's very own Pygmy Rabbit, which is dwindling across its range due to habitat destruction. The Washington State population has been listed as an endangered species since 2003, which wasn't a tough call since there's only a few dozen of them left in the wild. However, just over a year ago the US Fish & Wildlife Service refused to seriously consider listing the species as a whole. Seems that certain pygmy rabbits made the poor choice to live in western Wyoming (Cheney's supposed home state, by which I mean "where his Tie Fighter crash-landed"), right on top of possible oil and gas deposits. And if there's one thing constant about the current administration, it's that anything or anyone who gets between them and their oil will be enthusiastically slaughtered.

Since George hates bunnies, we can be absolutely sure that Jesus hates bunnies too. Although maybe not for exactly the same reasons. Maybe he's still bitter about the whole Easter thing, which I guess is understandable, but condemning all rabbits over one single puny crucifixion (and a temporary one, too, if contemporary accounts are to be believed) is just overdoing it. I certainly would've thought he of all people would be above petty guilt-by-association. But then, I never was cut out to be a theologian, I guess. It's all so complicated.

Lest you think this whole post is going to be yet another political rant, let's move on to the third picture, which links to a post by a Swedish blogger. I'm not entirely what it's about; the only Swedish-to-English online translator I've come across is SYSTRAN, and the results aren't all that intelligible:

” how sheep one a rabbit to jump over an obstacle, and so many obstacles consecutive, that moreover is high?” The each the most common question I might until when I tävla in Kaninhoppning. I believe that the reply is an ensemble average rabbit and drivers, but also a lot of tactic, technology and to last friend with the animal. How man goes to weigh stages for stages goes to read in the last beech about Kanin-hoppning. The is typed of the before this federation's chairman Lisbeth Jansson, and the each also she that typed the very the first beech about this sport.

So from what I can gather, there's a competitive sport that involves having rabbits run obstacle courses. The link within the quote points at what is (I think) a local club or federation devoted to the sport. Who knew?

And what post about rabbits would be complete without at least one bad movie reference? The image above links to one review of the timeless classic "Night of the Lepus", starring Janet Leigh and DeForest Kelley, among others. Another review is here, and there's quite a few more out there, if you're interested, which I'm positive you are.


tags: rabbit bunny endangeredbush cheney lepus jesus kaninhoppning

Today's Found Objects

Four political pics: two of our Glorious Leader, and two of our Actual Leader.

---

Four items found by using that neato "Next Blog" button up in the corner, two of which are about food.

• Random Thoughts That's the blog's name. Has an interesting post about ex-CNN anchor Aaron Brown's recent appearance at Southern Oregon University
  
• A blogger from Chile reminisces about his old Atari. Ahh. A compatriot. I'll have to share some ancient Atari memories of my own some time.
  
• The Blog that ate Manhattan, about cooking and such. The current recipe is for a Thai Beef Salad, and sounds very tasty.
  
• The Shredded Monkey, another cooking blog, not actually featuring monkey in any form that I can tell. Current article is about grilling salmon. Mmmmm.... Fishhhh.....
  

---

Three articles about GWB's (hopefully dwindling) personality cult, plus one fun example of said cult:

• "Is Bush Worship a Cult?"
  
• "The Cult of Bush"
  
• "George Bush and the Rise of Christian Fascism"
  
• And whaddya know, here's one company that would love to sell you an extra-special Jesus fish emblazoned with the words "BUSH" and "One nation under god".
  

Not Very Confidential Video

So right on the heels of Mardi Gras we now learn that our Glorious Leader in fact was warned about Katrina after all. It's all caught on what media accounts refer to as a "confidential" government video. Which to me is the only shocking part about this latest news. Keeping a video record of how decisions are made doesn't really seem like the Bush way. I suspect that the one and only lesson George will come away with from all this is to never keep any records of this kind, or if it's unavoidable, classify them as Top Secret and stash them away in the equivalent of the vast government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. And track down whoever leaked the current videos and have 'em tortured, of course. That goes without saying.

Right now they're spinning it that the public shouldn't read anything whatsoever into the few videos that have come out, since they aren't representative of the Katrina decisionmaking process as a whole. And of course they're also refusing to release any more videos so that the public can see the "real" picture they're telling us exists. No, your job as a patriotic American is to ignore the evidence, and have faith that the Glorious Leader can do no wrong. Otherwise the terrorists win.

Really, I'm not kidding. For example, in this blog hosted by the Chicago Tribune, the poster argues the videos have just made Bush's political troubles over Katrina that much worse. Which is not exactly going out on a limb these days. The interesting part is the user comments, where a poster calling himself Bruce froths at the mouth about all the "leftists" out there bashing our president. See, what it all really boils down to is the subtle distinction between "breaching" and "overtopping" a levee. Displaced New Orleans residents may see this as splitting hairs, but we're told that in reality it's absolutely crucial. If you use one of the two words when talking to the president, and then the other thing happens, well, clearly he wasn't warned, had absolutely no reason to believe anything bad would happen, and is therefore blameless as always. See, it all depends on what the definition of "is" is, or something. It never ceases to amaze me how the first post always goes to a wingnut, and the wingnuts always have the party-line talking points memorized. (Another example: USA Today survey of the blogosphere reaction. First post: wingnut.) Sometimes I wonder if there's a big bunker full of these people somewhere deep beneath the beltway, where a legion of party hacks is paid to surf the net all day, hunting for even the mildest criticism of the government, and responding with cookie-cutter screeching tirades. It would explain a lot, although "Bruce" claims to be a teacher of some kind, and says he'd give an 'F' to any student who made an argument similar to the one the blogger presents. Which doesn't surprise me a lot either. It seems to have become a core conservative tenet these days that if you have any power at all, no matter how small and petty it is, you have a solemn obligation to shamelessly abuse that power in the name of politics (or religion, which is basically the same thing anymore).

Anyway, now I can't help but wonder whether there's a videotape lying around somewhere that shows GWB and friends deciding to lie to the world about WMDs, or to assume everything will go smoothly in postwar Iraq. That would be fascinating to watch. Alas, someone's probably erasing those tapes even as I write this.

Which sort of brings us to the other political tempest of the day, the Dubai ports deal. The administration, and its media cheering section, would like us to know that only bigoted, isolationist xenophobes could possibly be against the deal. Fancy that, Bush trying to shame us into supporting his latest bungle with what is essentially a political correctness argument. Wonders just never cease. Here's a good rebuttal to that argument, good because it doesn't couch its opposition to the deal in terms of pure political opportunism. To a lot of liberally-minded people, it seems safer or more PC somehow to flat out say they're opposing the deal strictly out of a cynical quest for partisan advantage, rather than admit the whole thing gives them the willies. Which is a sad comment on what politics are like in this country anymore, but there you go. I'd like to suggest that being "xenophobic", as the pundits put it, is nothing to apologize for, so long as there's a real rational basis for it. Don't get me wrong, I'll happily award George points for being idealistic, and suggesting that the UAE ought to be treated the same way as the UK. The world would be a fantastic place if that was possible. But sadly, it isn't, at least not right now.

One of the pro-deal arguments that really irks me is that if the deal doesn't go through, we risk alienating friendly governments. And the last thing we'd ever want to do is anger a supposed ally. Which is not an argument we heard Bush making in the runup to the Iraq war, certainly. And yes, we do count the UAE as an "ally", at least on paper, but our problem in the Gulf has never been a shortage of friendly, corrupt, medieval despots. People at my end of the political spectrum have been arguing for decades that we shouldn't be supporting these people. In recent years Bush has been arguing in favor of "democracy" in the region, which would be great if I though he really meant it. But then, the indications are that the general public in the UAE (and surrounding Gulf states) doesn't like us very much.

We can argue til we're out of breath about whether tolerance should extend to societies that oppress women and routinely behead people for being gay, or criticizing the government, or even practicing "sorcery", whatever that is. I tend to think tolerance is a two-way street. When a country teaches its schoolchildren they have a duty to go slaughter the infidels, a group that presumably includes me, it tends to reduce the level of goodwill I'm willing to show them in return. That's just human nature, PC or not. I don't cut a lot of slack for creepy religious fundies here at home, and I really can't bring myself to be all that much more forgiving of them abroad, regardless of the particular religion they're going all fundamental about.

Dubai, in recent years, has struck me as an especially horrifying place, an utterly artificial, futuristic dystopia straight out of a bad SF novel. The emirate's leaders have positioned the place as a sort of Disneyland for billionaires, with world-class golf courses, ultra-luxurious hotels, fabulous shopping, and a complete absence of basic freedoms of any kind, basically Singapore with burqas, with the added attraction of a meek, nearly invisible and poorly-paid noncitizen underclass to perform all the actual labor. Metropolis, anyone? The WTO's met here on occasion, since they've gotten sick of all those protesters they tend to attract. No problem, just hold the meetings somewhere where protesting isn't allowed. Problem solved.

There's another argument you see sometimes, saying that if we don't approve the deal, we're meddling in the free market, which is Bad. Whether that's actually Bad is an argument for another time, but let me just point out that the company in question is a state-owned enterprise in Dubai. They're about as free-market as, say, Amtrak. I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, necessarily, just that the free market argument is deeply bogus.

But in the end, the argument Bush & Co. always come back to is that we should support the deal just because he says so. He says it's been reviewed thoroughly, although he won't say exactly how, and that should be good enough for us all. Even though the entire process happened without his direct involvement. I guess the argument is that the Glorious Leader is infallible even when he's out of the loop, in which case the junior staffers who made the call were just being infallible on his behalf. In general, all government employees are infallible, and have been so since January 2001, insofar as they're carrying out the Leader's whims and desires.

On the bright side, this is an election year. Yay!


Tags: mardi gras new orleans katrina bush video iraq wmd dubai uae wto

Sword & Sorcery (stopgap edition)

I don't recall if I've actually promised to do a really thorough post about the many joys of 80's sword & sorcery movies, but I meant to promise to do that. And if I had promised, and you'd been waiting all this time, today would almost, but not quite, be your lucky day.

I say almost, because this post is not the end-all-be-all post I may or may not have promised. I'll get around to that sooner or later. Instead, for the time being, here's a fun and amusing grab-bag of other people's S&S movie reviews I've run across, some of which include stills and/or movie poster art (such as it is). I should note in passing that S&S movie art traditionally bears no resemblance to anything in the actual movie. For instance, the Deathstalker poster shown here (which links to a movie review in Hungarian, if you're up for that) pictures a large troll-like creature, although nothing like it appears anywhere in the film.

Other than Deathstalker II and Barbarian, I haven't actually seen these movies (yet, anyway). Some aren't out on DVD. Others are, but Netflix doesn't have 'em. So it's not for lack of trying. That's basically what I'm trying to say here.

• Deathstalker II. As I've noted before, D2 is the absolute cream of the crop so far as S&S movies go. The DVD audio commentary by the director and a couple of the stars is priceless.
  
• Deathstalker III, which I haven't seen. Of the four films in the Deathstalker saga (five, if you count the much later Barbarian), this is the only one that isn't out on DVD. And I don't own a VHS player anymore. It's a crime against humanity, I tell ya.
  
• Dungeons and Dragons
  
• Warrior Queen
  
• Several movies including The Conquest. I see that Netflix has just gotten itself a copy of The Conquest, so if it's up to snuff I may say a few words about it in the near future. Updated: I've seen it, and my review is here.
  
• Quest for the Mighty Sword (ator)
  
• Quest of the Delta Knights
  
• Sorceress, the 1982 film by that name, not the 1995 Julie Strain vehicle by the same name, which I haven't seen either. Incidentally, the latter is not an S&S movie, but it was directed by the same guy who did Deathstalker II many years earlier.
  
• Princess Warrior.
  

And let's do some silly Technorati Tags just for the hell of it. I'm curious to see if anybody shows up here because of these.
sword sorcery sorceress barbarian movie deathstalker princess queen warrior dvd vhs netflix troll

Referreriffic

One of the more fascinating things about this whole blog racket is the way you often get chance visitors wandering in from other blogs, solely because they happened to be nosing around the wonderful world of Blogspot at roughly the same time you posted. This is quite fascinating, in that you end up with a fairly random (there's that word again) slice of the web, or at least that part of the blogosphere hosted within the borders of the Google Empire.

I like the idea of a list that forms on its own, without anyone making a conscious decision to categorize all these blogs together. You could call the list an HTML found object, I guess. Or an instance of order (of a sort) emerging from chaos, perhaps. The repressed conceptual artist inside me -- and admit it, we've all got one -- really lives for this kind of stuff.

[Technical note: Maybe you didn't know this, but when you click on a link from one page to another, your browser cheerfully gives the new website the url of the page you came from. That's what I mean when I say "referrer". Some random visitor was at each of these pages, clicked "Next Blog" or did something else that sent them from there to here, and left visible footprints in the process. Some browsers let you disable or monkey around with your referrer field. If you use Safari, you might want to take a look at PithHelmet, which gives you control over this and other stuff.]

So here's a list of recent Blogspot referrers, with spam "blogs" weeded out, listed in no particular order. At the risk of imposing arbitrary structure on this delightfully unordered list, a few blogs I thought were standouts of the bunch are in bold. Not that I'm trying to influence you or otherwise reduce the local entropy level, mind you.

The image, incidentally, is a random walk, a topic of ongoing interest in math, physics, and CS. The researchers at the University of Texas note they're using a physical source of true randomness, not something generated by a computer, which would be pseudorandom at best. So it's not really the same sort of thing as what we're talking about right now, but it's an interesting subject on its own, and the resulting images seem apropos to our topic, at least in an aesthetic sense.

So here's our list:

• Liftakna
  
• fender_girlz_world
  
• More Ohio Backroad Pics
  
• RP Guest Services
  
• Sobre Futbol
  
• "Space" [twentysixtytwo] (Astronomy pics)
  
• The Gathering (Baptist)
  
• VCC HS Boys Small Group
  
• Don't waste the pretty
  
• Mind Spa
  
• "life is a zoo in a jungle..."
  
• Best Blonde Jokes
  
• Straight Flushing
  
• mitt liv som schweizare
  
• econhour3 - top article right now is about the Olympics.
  
• Rainbows and Storms
  
• Viñas y sierras del oeste argentino Not a lot here, but it's about Argentinian wine, which I (and my wallet) are fans of.
  
• Through the Eyes of the Beholder
  
• Aziza's Island Oasis
  
• Foreclosure of a Dream
  
• Marcela Infante
  
• The Parker Land
  
• KGV Library Zone
  
• Adam
  
• Say NO to Jim and Dawn Gibbons. A liberal/progressive blog from Nevada.
  
• marcelleqb
  
• for yu hui
  
• زیر گنبد کبود (The blog name's in Farsi, as is most of the blog) I don't know very much about Iranian music, but the song linked to in the post "Throwing something out of my circle" is quite nice, I think. Also a recent post about the Oscars. I have to agree, I too am pleased that Brokeback Mountain didn't win.
  
• Diario de un sufí de Alcorcón An art & poetry blog from Spain, which also has an Oscars post. Well, a photo of Jack Nicholson. (gag! blech!)
  

Mardi Gras by proxy

So it's cold, dark, and miserable outside in this joyless northern city of ours. Meanwhile, people half a continent away are having a grand old time, and some of them may even remember it tomorrow. But thanks to the magic of the Internet, we can get a small inkling of all the brainless and irresponsible fun we're missing out on. That may be good or bad, I'm not sure. So here's what showed up after wandering the net for a while, while waiiiiiting for my uber-overweight C++ app to recompile on a slowwwwww HP-UX box:

• A rant about the city of New Orleans's comically failed attempt to find commercial sponsors for this year's Mardi Gras.
  
• An artist/blogger from New Orleans discussing the
  glory of beads. This is where that cool frog photo comes from. As she puts it, Reason number five million and eight why New Orleans is the greatest city on Earth: in New Orleans, even the trees wear jewelry!.
  
• A brief history of the culinary phenomenon that is king cake.
  
• A lesson for the uninitiated about what Mardi Gras is all about, really, including a bunch of king cake photos (including the one you see here).
  
• One blogger's memories of going to Mardi Gras with his buddies way back in Y2K.
  
• Another Mardi Gras reminiscence, including a paean to Popeye's biscuits.
  
• A post about the singular joys of bringing a fundie to Fat Tuesday.
  
• The source of that "We're from Texas, you OWE us" image. The poster is sort of disgusted, and rightly so.
  
• How could I not pass along this post about the local beer down New Orleans way? I mean, it's beer...
  
• Yet another blogger who found a previous Mardi Gras a bit mind-boggling.
  
• Seems everyone except me has a Mardi Gras story. Here's another one.
  
• An interesting and unusual perspective on the holiday, coming from a Catholic seminarian in New Orleans.
  
• A comedian from New Orleans has a piece about why Mardi Gras is important.
  
• Of course, you can never really get away from the earnest, well-meaning people who feel nobody should have a single moment of fun until we've gotten rid of all the bad stuff going on in the world. Here's one example.
  
• And the inevitable earnest documentary about how Mardi Gras beads are made in China.
  
• A student whose Sociology prof gave a talk about "Ritual disrobement during Mardi Gras", which is apparently an outgrowth of the capitalist system. It's really astonishing the things you can get a grant to study these days.
  
• That professor may not even be right, to top it all off. Here's at least one visitor who practices a socialist bead-throwing philosophy.
  
• Someone else writing about the ongoing "gone wild" phenomeonon. You know you want to read it.
  
• Holiday greetings from another blog I stumbled across. Probably not safe for work, of course depending on where you work.
  
• A post aptly titled Mardi Gras Hangover, with links to numerous photos. [Added 3/1/06]
  

Tags: mardi gras new orleans.

large & small stuff, plus current events

I've sworn a solemn oath to never use the words "random" or "musings" in a weblog post title ever again (and let's add "thoughts" and "meme" while we're at it), so today's title is about as generic as I'm likely to get. You might have noticed that I've just figured out how to do those fancy-schmancy Technorati tags, and I suppose it's possible I'm overusing the feature just a little.

Pop quiz: Of the two images here, which one is a new Cassini image of the surface of Titan, and which one is an electron microscope image of a viroid? Kind of hard to tell, isn't it?

I was reading a bit about viruses recently, due to that annoying cold I had that I'm nowhere close to finished whining about just yet. I hadn't realized that there's now an ongoing effort to classify viruses and give them latin names. So that most common cold viruses fall under the family Picornaviridae, genus Rhinovirus. The little bastards.

[Note: If you really aren't that interested in my latest science-geek diversion, just scroll down the page a few paragraphs until you see the words Mardi Gras.]

Here's a good article I came across that talks about subcellular life forms. I'd been planning to talk about some of the topics in that article myself, but it's clear and well-written, and I'm lazy, so I'll just say "yeah, what he said". In particular, the discussion about plasmids is interesting. At present they aren't usually considered to be "alive", but this strikes me as an arbitrary choice. I suspect they'll eventually come to be seen as viruses that just happen to have a symbiotic, rather than a pathogenic, relationship to their host cells.

Virology is an interesting subject to me because even though a vast amount is known about viruses, the basic taxonomy is still being sorted out, and fundamental questions like "how did viruses originate" are still very open questions. It's not even known whether all viruses share a common origin or not. It's possible that at one point all life looked sort of viruslike, for example see the RNA world hypothesis, and the less-popular hypothesis that the very first life forms were based on something called peptide nucleic acid, or PNA, a robust but not very versatile cousin of RNA and DNA.

Jumping abruptly from small to large, here's a new hypothesis about what's inside gas giant planets. In the end, it's still the case that nobody really knows, and nobody's come up with a good way of finding out. The Galileo probe seems to have been less helpful than everyone expected, for example. Cassini's sent back some interesting pictures of clouds at Saturn, but still no definite word on what's under the clouds.

I personally feel that all questions about cosmology, origins, the universe, and everything, would be much easier to address if we were all to adopt the Misanthropic Principle. (Contrast that with the more widely known "anthropic principle", which I tend to think of as "creationism for Mensa members".)

On an unrelated, yet timely and silly note, I'd like to work the tag "Mardi Gras" into this post somehow. And now I have. Yay. Which is about the closest I'm likely to get to a Mardi Gras celebration, as Portland is about as non-NOLA as it's possible to get. We're all prim and proper and we can only have a good time if we hide under a dozen layers of irony and pretend we hate the whole thing. We pretend we're all having a bitter laugh at the expense of people who don't have "creative class" jobs and expensive liberal arts degrees, but secretly we all wish we were them. Portlanders think it's hee-larious to wear John Deere hats in public and guzzle PBR from an actual beer can, as if it's all a silly lark, but ask them to give 'em up, and they can't. They just can't. People here are way too insecure and pseudo-sophisticated to ever simply have a good time and leave it at that.

In addition, Portlanders have been conditioned in recent years to think that if it's a real holiday, there ought to be a government-sponsored party in Pioneer Courthouse Square, or maybe Waterfront Park, even though most of the time there isn't one. The local TV news often sets up a camera crew near the square on Fat Tuesday, St. Patrick's, and a few other big days, and there are inevitably big groups of clueless people wandering around, wondering where the government's party is at. They always look utterly lost and confused, as if a few short years of mollycoddling by the city has rendered them unable to party on their own initiative. It's just as well that the city often neglects to hold a party, since these events are inevitably dreadful "family friendly" (meaning "alcohol-free") affairs, full of smug Subaru-driving yuppies all packing strollers the size of small SUVs and the inevitable pair of black labs. If I was the mayor, and I saw how one of these events turned out, I'd immediately cancel all future ones.

Meanwhile, if you run a bar or restaurant, you can't hold a proper party for fear of incurring the wrath of the jackbooted thugs of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission [PDF].

It's all a crying shame, really. Except for the evil booze police and the sheeplike, proudly anhedonic general public, we've got everything we need for a good time. You need streets for parades, and we have those. We have a container ship terminal somewhere in town, so you can import entire shiploads of beads right here, directly from China. Lots of multistory buildings, some with balconies, so the whole bead-throwing thing can be done properly. We even have very lenient laws about public nudity here, so we could even pull that off as well (so to speak), in the unlikely event that the weather cooperates. Alas...


[Oh, BTW, the first picture is the viroid, the other is Titan, in case you were curious, yet not curious enough to bother clicking on either link. So now you know. And as GI Joe said, knowing is half the battle.]