"How to" indeed

Today I wanted a little information about something I'd heard. There supposedly exists a small-batch bourbon whiskey of remarkable flavor that happens to be drawn from the cask and bottled uncut, leaving it at around 122 proof (that's approximately 61% alcohol by volume). If the interwebs are to be believed, it does exist and is actually supposed to be a pretty good drink.

Of course, if the interwebs are to be believed, searching for that meant I was also likely to be interested in how to deal with a faux pas, find a job in a growth industry, "help a suicidal student", and how to ski.

Thanks, interwebs, I can feel myself getting more well-rounded every damn second.

AAAAHH! NOOOOO!

How'd I forget about...

Red Meat? Oh, Milkman Dan and Pipe Smoking Ted, I'm glad to see you're still around.

Rarer than diamonds, more precious than gold

Depending on when (or if) you read this, the odds are pretty good that someone recently was talking about humans returning to the moon. Or why going to the moon again is not optional, but necessary. Or perhaps that it's not feasible or responsible or conscionable, given the other issues facing people here on the ground. But regardless of what the schmuck on the street has to say, for or against, it doesn't look like anyone is going to spend enough money to put people on the moon again in the next couple of years.

Which might explain why an article like this depresses me more than I would have expected. So the US government in the 1970s decided to dole out moon rocks as ambassadorial keepsakes to friend(ly governments)s and (hoped for) allies and such. And now some of them are missing, presumably in the hands of private collectors.

Can you do anything with moon rocks? As far as I know, they don't power anything, they don't sparkle or gleam, and they're nothing special to the untrained eye. Apparently petrified wood was a reasonable substitute for the missing Dutch moon rock. So unless you've got some really special research to get done, they're not even particularly useful, just very, very rare.

It seems that NASA has a grand total of 842 pound of moon rock left. Until someone else gets a machine to the moon and back, that's it. There is no more access to moon rock. If going to the moon was really a giant leap for all mankind, with "for" meaning "on behalf of", then whoever has swiped pieces of moon rock has effectively refused to share with everyone else on the planet. I gots my piece of history, and the rest of you can go right to hell.

People, we've got to do better than this. Zero-sum games are not the only option.

Discovery News: Apollo moon rocks missing

Relatively speaking

Last night I had a headache so bad that for a while I couldn't see. It hurt in parts of my head that I usually don't pay any attention to. For a period of time, all I was could think of was what felt like my sphenoid and occitipal bones 1 , and the screaming line of rusty barbed wire that connected them.

So it was with some trepidation that I considered my status today. For the first couple of hours I was awake, I don't think my head hurt. But the memory of it was so fresh that I couldn't be sure. I'd like to think this will make me more of the days when when I wake up and feel fine. But it's a damn easy thing to get to taking that for granted. So for now, yes, things are okay. I'm feeling no pain in the traditional sense 2 , and it's alllll right.

1. No, I didn't know what they were called until I looked them up today. Skulls are really complicated on the inside.
2. As in, no unusual discomfort, and not the slangy term for inebriation. People still say that, right? C'mon, someone else has to remember Gordon Lightfoot's 1974 hit?

Sundown?

Anyone?

So, what's IBM done for you lately?

Pictures.
Tiny, tiny pictures.

Like, pictures of individual molecules.









[Image by Science/AAAS]

From Technology Review

Science toddles on...

There aren't enough experiments that involve comparing human young with other animals.

Discovery News: Dogs Read Gestures Like Toddlers

Best line comes at the end: "[The researcher] does warn against simply thinking of dogs as furry versions of a two-year-old, given that no toddler could ever herd a flock of sheep as well as a dog."

You hear that, human toddlers? Just sit your diaper-clad asses down, you ain't even in the running on this one.

¿Los Ingleses? No los conocen...

Some of you may be old enough to remember Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all of Mexico. And some of you may remember when he was pulled from TV rotation for, uh, well, I'm not entirely clear about that part. I think it was because he was viewed as being a negative stereotype. Possibly it was for speaking in less than perfect English (as compared to... Elmer Fudd? Sylvester? Daffy Duck? Pepe Le Pew?). Or maybe it was for wearing a simplified and stereotypical costume. One argument claims that even though Speedy's raison d'être was to outrun, outwit and outclass the hapless gringos that stood between him and his goals, he was overshadowed by the stereotyped behavior of most of the other mice. Of course, there may have been a whiff of the Frito Bandito controversy hanging around that made Ted Turner's various underlings try to err on the side of safety when they first shelved most of Mr. Gonzales' cartoons.

All of which is to say that in the US, there have been some struggles over what kind of cultural images are acceptable and what aren't. Just in case you hadn't heard, the English-speaking world is not unified enough for these sorts of things to apply everywhere. Example 1: the Asda brand tortilla packaging in the UK. Sorry first about the scan quality, and sorry second about having had wholewheat tortillas in my kitchen. I'm in a foreign land here, and sometimes you just have to make do with what fate throws your way. Now, in case you didn't get a good look at the logo, why don't you check out a close-up.

Seriously. Leaving aside the questionable coloring on the hands (Gloves? Shadows?), what the hell is up with the rest of that? I guess he's supposed to be ecstatic over the quality of the tortillas (which, apart from being wholewheat and too small weren't terrible, or terribly different from those spongy-bleached "wraps" that somehow make people feel better about eating a chicken salad sandwich). But do people here believe Mexicans are that excitable? And bandoliers? Quick check here: who can you think of that wears a bandolier? The list is weirder than I first thought.

Thinking about it, though, maybe there's just too much remove from Mexico for the average British person to get why this might be problematic. I mean, Spain isn't that far away, and the only Spanish character in the British media I can think of is from a show that's 30 years old. There's just no opportunity for most folks here to make any connections between these images and real people. Mexicans? Why not ask about Hui or Sumerians or Yukaghirs, they've got about as much to do with most people's daily experiences here.

Which may be why so few people here seem to find these things odd.


The three images above are from The Dieline, a website about food packaging design and their report on the 2008 Pacakging Design Award winners.

You think you're happy?

You ain't got nothing on Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. Seriously. So take your rinky-dink happiness back to the minor leagues, along with your so-called professional attitude and your 61 mile an hour fastball.

Loser.

You know what I haven't done in a while?

I haven't checked out CNN dot com for a while. Let's see what they think is newsworthy today...


..God damn it. Marion "crack pipe"Barry arrested for stalking?

How the hell did a man caught on videotape smoking crack first get re-elected to mayor, and then elected again to city council? Why the crap didn't the people of Washington D.C. just slap his dumb ass with a sock full of pennies and tell him to get the hell out of town? There used to be a popular and appropriate civic response to this sort of thing.


Boy, I really would like to watch O Brother again.