MetaFilter sent me to a hilarious site (subtitled “A Primer on Parent Cruelty“) at which a commentator tears into posts on baby name bulletin boards.  For instance, there’s this:

For the last 50 years, my family has been naming their children after Southwestern Ontario cities.  My brother is Barrie, my sister is Kingston, and my cousin is Markham.  I am due in two weeks (it’ll be a girl) and I thinking about naming her either York or Orillia.  What do others think?

I think it’s time for a nuclear strike against Ottawa.

… and this …

here are some names i saw today

kaytaquana

alliwen

camianne

shaynelna

karlakenya

adanah

leezi

mays

karjovon

brandnel

jaslera

breedee

tylee

allikaylor

tylera

shairani

I’m guessing (hoping, praying) these are names you saw today while you were hitting random keys on the computer at Bellevue just before the Thorazine kicked in.  Wait, let me try:

huvven

woakam

euwher

iluhad

joofenkel (for boy or girl)

jofwern

mu’ulf

opiuren

puj

yubjibi

roowp

qimwoup

Abcadeffgheejecklemenopqrestuvwexiz (the most incredible word I’ve ever seen!)

Not that I’m completely innocent in this respect.  I think Niamh (feminine) and Reason (masculine) are great names.  But Jaslera?  Karlakenya?  Let’s hope the person was joking.

One person proposes what he calls the “Secretary of State Test”, “i.e., imagine how it would sound to have a news anchor read the now-adult child’s name out in a serious context like “Today at the United Nations, Secretary of State [Brandy Alexandra Jones] condemned Iraq’s stance….”  Another person, at a different site, suggests that when naming a child, you should first “go to the back door, fling it open and yell the name at the top of your lungs six or eight times, because that’s how it’s going to be heard for the next eighteen years.”

Allan I. Teger’s Bodyscapes are created by photographing miniature models positioned on the nude human body to give the impression of landscape.  They are quite striking.  I especially like Fishing Trip, Mountain Climbers, and Overlook.

OK, everything should be up and running again, save ScotchFinder, which will take quite a bit more work.  Let me know if you have any problems with the site, email, etc.

The mcgees.org server (which is also the davidjmcgee.com server, the ScotchFinder server, etc.) is undergoing a major upgrade.  Expect outages and bounced emails for a bit, but then everything should be much more stable.

I’ve yet to decide whether I really like Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.  However, I have to admit there are few chapter titles in the world I like more than “Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle”.

A gem from ‘the CarTalk section of cars.com’:

Q: Would it be safe to travel with approximately 50 pounds of dry ice in the trunk of a car over a two- to three-day period?  There will be two adults and two pets traveling in the car. — Karen

A: As long as one of the pets is a canary, Karen.

The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize winner for chemistry is Theodore Gray, who made an actual periodic table.  You know, four legs, wood, the kind you can sit at to eat lunch, but with inlaid wooden squares on the top, and under each square a sample of the element.  The site is fantastic: this guy has a taste for statistics, sorting, and random information that may even exceed my own: on his Collections of Elements page, he sorts the elements in more than thirty ways, including “Elements [you can buy] at Walmart”, “Coin Metals”, and “Elements that spell OLiVEr SAcKS”.  He has a page on How to Get Your Own Element Collection, and each element has its own page.

He also has an interesting discussion on education at the site:

Jerry: People are very attached to the value of their skills.  They believe that the skills of their generation should be preserved, with new skills added on.

Theo: Such an attitude represents a tremendous degree of disrespect of our forepersons.  It was really, really hard to be a cave person.  The skills needed to live comfortably in, say, northern Europe in 20,000 BCE were extremely complex.  They required then and would require now the full range of human intelligence.

To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do (hunt, speak Latin, do square roots by hand, etc.), and also have any time left over to learn anything new (microbiology, email, calculus), is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence.  It is also quite false.

A handful of eco-athletic types have embarked on possibly the most ambitious athletic activity of all time: a seven year, 40,000 mile walk from the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn, with short boat rides across the Red Sea and the Bering Strait.  Be sure to check out their travel log, full of striking pictures.  I was especially taken by the photograph entitled Beasts of the Karoo 3 – Angora goats in the gathering gloom before a storm.

Jennifer asked in the mcgees.org QuickTopic forum that I mention the wines I chose for dinner with my parents this past weekend.  We were having Italian cold cuts (some spicy), bread, and sharp cheeses.  I wanted massive Italian wines that could stand up to the onslaught.  I chose two that are currently available at Trader Joe’s in Southern California.  The first is a Barolo, a wine from Piedmont made from the nebbiolo grape.  It is the 1997 “Tenuta La Loggia”.  It is full-bodied, tannic, complex, and dry.  It spent some of its life residing in chestnut casks and is a gorgeous, deep blood red.  It is drinkable now about an hour after decanting, and should cellar well for several years.  It costs $12.99 per bottle.

The second was an Amarone, labeled “1997 Amarone Classico D.O.C. Conte di Bregonzo”.  It is also massive, highly tannic, and could easily use more years in the bottle.  It is thick and fiercely dry.  If you are planning to drink it now, open it well ahead of time, decant and aerate it well.  The wine is only $9.99 per bottle.  Many locations are out of the ’97 now, although bottles of the ’98 remain (I have not tried the ’98.)

There is a good exclusive interview with Al Gore at washingtonpost.com.

Russian, Albanian Election Monitors Sent to Florida

The most heartwarming thing just happened to me.  Regular readers of mcgees.org will know of my love for tea, specifically teas from In Pursuit of Tea, and more specifically the Autumn Green that I wrote about previously.  In that post, I mentioned using the last of the Autumn Green, and being intrigued by In Pursuit of Tea’s offering of Pouchong Ming Yue, which is supposed to be similar but better.  I finished the post with the lines

I’m considering whether to re-order the Autumn Green, of which they still have some sealed stock left over from last year, or to just order the Ming Yue.  Considering their high recommendation, and my sentimental attachment to the Autumn Green, I might just do both.

Well, I ended up not doing so.  I did not re-order my cherished Autumn Green, instead ordering the Pouchong Ming Yue, the Tieguanyin Competition Monkey Picked, the Dragon Well Superior Grade Green, and re-ordering the Sencha, all of which are expensive teas.

Exactly four weeks ago I placed the order.  My credit card was charged, but after two weeks the package had not shown up.  I called them and they apologized profusely: my order had never been sent out.  They promised to do so immediately.  A week and a half later, the order still had not shown up.  I called back: again they apologized, as they once again neglected to send out my order.  By this point I was getting slightly annoyed, as I was highly looking forward to tasting the new teas.  They promised to send the package out second day air, and it would get here by the end of the week.

Today, Thursday, I woke up to find the package on my doorstep.  I took the box in to work, unopened, glad to finally have my four teas.  I got to my desk and opened the package.  On my receipt, the co-owner of the company had hand-written “Please enjoy the Autumn Green Oolong.  Sorry again for the mixup.”  He knows I love the Autumn Green, knows I did not order it this time, and sent a quarter pound of it free of charge.  How wonderful is that?

Last night I was fortunate to catch the second half of a National Public Radio roundtable between the American Independent, Natural Law, and Green Party candidates in California’s gubernatorial race.  It was an interesting half hour.  The American Independent party is frightening, seeming to be right of Pat Robertson.  In his closing statements, their candidate expressed his desire for the state to — I am not making this up — “return to an Ozzie and Harriet California.”  The Natural Law candidate, after she loses this election, could probably get a job writing greeting cards for Hallmark.  Her speech was packed full of platitudes such as, “We must remember that our greatest resource is our human resource.”  Well, thanks; that was informative.

The Green Party candidate, for whom I am voting, generally came across well.  He completely blew his top at one point, however, to the point of near shouting, and in the process seemed to disparage European-descended Americans (he is a Latino.)  He did have a bit of provocation: the American Independent candidate had just stated that the solution to California’s immigration problems is to — and again I am not making this up — return to an Ellis Island model in which prospective immigrants are screened for diseases and their criminal records checked to make sure we are not letting rapists and murderers into the state.  The quote out of context, unnerving as it is, does not give his sentiment enough force: the intonation and context were akin to his saying “we need to keep those filthy, criminal, diseased wetback animals from polluting our beautiful state”; that is, our beautiful, white, Ozzie and Harriet state.

According to an ABC poll, the Green Party candidate is receiving 9% support (I don’t know if this is all people surveyed, registered voters, likely voters, or some other subgroup.)  That’s close to double-digits.  Europe went from Fascist leaders to Green leaders in half a century: I can still hold out hope for California.

(Note 31 October 2002: This came about a bit more harshly than it should have.  Sorry about that.  I have left it up unedited as it has already been discussed at QuickTopic, where a good discussion is going on.)

From the Christian Charity Department of mcgees.org:

If you don’t like Christianity, [t]hen why don’t all of you leave America, this country was founded by Christians for Christians. And if you don’t like it then go to a Godless heathen nation that agrees with your retard tinged philosophy. Their are way more of us Christians than you losers. Their is NO separation of church and state and you heathens will lose. Thankfully you are old and I hope you get a painful disease like rectal cancer and die a slow painful death, so you can meet your God, SATAN . . . .

There’s more.  You can view other hate mail filled with intolerant diatribes, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay messages, and anonymous death threats.

I am told frequently by Christians that while Christians might say hateful things and perform horrific acts, this is not the fault of Christianity.  Besides echoes of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, it is simply untrue.  Racism, intolerance of homosexuality, misogyny, and death threats are what the Bible excel at.  The book has taken these sentiments to dizzying heights.  Yes, I know that the Bible also attributes to Jesus the sentiment that we should love our neighbors.  But accepting that in light of other Biblical tales requires either a very diseased notion of love or a very limiting definition of neighbor.

Talk some time to a mainstream Christian and try to discern his or her criteria for determing whether something in the Bible is custom, a fallacy of man attributed to God, or truly God’s word.  A woman wearing men’s clothes is an abomination to God: that’s just a custom, you will be told, especially by a woman in slacks and a shirt.  We’re allowed to keep slaves: whoops, that’s a fallacy of man attributed to God, because we know slaveholding is wrong.  You must believe in God or you will go to hell: tada, that one’s God.

If the Christian is a non-fundamentalist with even an gram of education or understanding of physical processes, ask about the six day creation story.  Umm, must be a customary story, or a metaphor of some sort.  A woman who commits adultery, or a son who disrespects his parents, should be killed: yikes, that’s a fallacy of man, because, after all, God is Love.  One should love one’s neighbor as oneself: yep, God.

A pattern emerges quite rapidly.  If your conversation partner has already decided something is right, that’s the will of God.  If he or she has already decided something is wrong, that’s the will of man.  And if he or she has decided something is absurd, that’s custom.  In a way you have to respect the logic of Orthodox Jews more, who follow jaw-dropping, staggeringly pointless rules such as a hamburger being OK to eat, and a grilled cheese sandwich being OK to eat, but a cheeseburger being an abomination to God.  For the mainstream Christians, it’s all ad hoc justification.  It’s just each person’s prejudice given selective support by a deity.  (I’m not, by the way, saying Christians should logically follow kosher laws.  In their “New Testament” kosher laws are explicitly overturned.  “Yes, I know that eating pork was an abomination last Tuesday,” God says, “but it’s not any longer.”)

Rather than send hate-filled, death-threat-laden, and badly spell-checked missives to people in their communities, this group of Christians should grow spines, stop threatening that their invisible friend will beat people up, and begin to come to grips with their own hate, bigotry, and closed-mindedness.  We are all neighbors, folks.  Put down your Bible, unload your shotgun, and start acting like it.

My hard drive at home crashed this weekend.  Not the mcgees.org machine, but the Windows machine that I use for banking, browsing, and word processing.  I have that feeling of a deep pit in my stomach that always happens in these situations where I should have been more intelligent, should not have trusted the particular hardware I was using, and should have been more diligent about making backups.  I was cavalier, and once again it cost me.

I found a site called “Amazon Whacking” the other day.  The site describes a game in which you start with a book at Amazon, follow one of the links to “Customers who bought this book also bought”, then repeat step 2 until you cannot continue without repeating a book in your path.  The “world record” was listed at 61 steps.  This sounded miniscule, so a couple days ago I decided to try it myself.  Searching manually, without the aid of a script, I found one of length 319.  By that point I was getting a bit bored; I’m sure I could have extended it further.  I sent it in to the guy who runs the site, and he has just added it to the Amazon Whacking page as the new “world record”.

Recent Microsoft applications and operating systems employ a highly annoying feature called “Personalized Menus”.  If a menu item is not used it will disappear from the menu.  The menu will then contain a little arrow that you have to click on to enable full menus.  Here is how to turn off this feature in various settings.

To disable menu item hiding in the Start Menu, go to Start -> Settings -> Taskbar & Start Menu… and turn off “Use Personalized Menus”.

To disable Favorites menu item hiding in Internet Explorer, go to Tools -> Internet Options… -> Advanced and turn off “Enable Personalized Favorites Menu” under “Browsing”.

To disable menu item hiding in Microsoft Office applications, go to Tools -> Customize… -> Options and turn off “Menus show recently used commands first”.

Deception has a new name: Joshua McGee

From inksyndicate.com

Last week Joshua McGee went so far as to leave the mainstream completely and enter a kind of obsessive and even dangerous alternate universe of duplicitous spin.

Like Bin Laden, Joshua McGee believes in a bizarrely hollow philosophy of mendacity.  Isn’t it clear by now that the world is menaced by a weaseling psychopath who has already tried to get his hands on uranium?  Joshua McGee and his outrageous slanderers are at it again.  “Don’t hurt me,” he said on his web page.  Well, duh.

Breathtakingly, to be one of the hate-crazed cultural elite is to deceive and disgrace.

When will Joshua McGee come clean about the way he attacks President Bush?

A leader not trying to take the war to Saddam would be outrageously pro-shoplifting in the extreme.

Had you going, didn’t I?  Visit Ink Syndicate’s R. Robot is making sense, enter the name of a liberal, and let the ‘warbot’ automatically craft an anti-liberal rant.

The Harvard Dialect Survey is fascinating, even with the maps currently disabled.  The questions made me consider things that I have not previously, and I was unfamiliar with many of the choices provided.  The survey asks you to answer based on what you grew up with.  What is most interesting to me is that I have changed 15 percent of these (18 out of 122) as a teenager or adult, generally consciously.  Check it out.  (Note: Do not use a secure password, as your username and password are displayed in the address window.)

I stumbled upon a collection of September 11 cartoons, some of which are quite touching.  One is a very simple picture of Uncle Sam on a couch, his top hat beside him, bent over and weeping into his hands.  Another simple cartoon shows a fireman in a soiled fire jacket with a Superman ‘S’ sewn on the back.  One cartoon has two kids trading cards; one says, “I’ll trade you two Michael Jordans and a Barry Bonds for one New York Fireman.”

A stirring cartoon shows the American eagle sitting on a stool with a determined look, holding a file, and sharpening his talons.  Another shows the moon with Earth in the distance; you see the plume of smoke coming out of New York, and the U.S. flag on the moon at half mast.  The final one I’ll mention shows a tree and a corner of a driveway.  The text reads:

There’s a small corner of my driveway at home that I often find myself staring at.

It’s where this guy I knew, Pat Danahy, sat in his car for well over an hour with the engine running.  He refused to get out because it was cold that morning, and his little girl was asleep in her car-seat and he couldn’t bear to wake her.

The last anybody saw of him, he was helping his co-workers evacuate their offices at Fiduciary Trust near the top of the World Trade Center.

Like I said, I stare at that spot a lot.

They are worth checking out.

Washington, behaving like a police state.  It makes me want to scream.

Pull the innocents from a crowd,

We’re all deserving something more

Wow, now I really want to move to Oregon.  Measure 23, if passed, would enact a single-payer state-wide comprehensive medical insurance program with zero point-of-service fees.  Citizens would be free to visit any licensed doctor or specialist.  The current government spending (out of general taxation) would cover one third of the expected costs, with the remainder payed by employers and a personal tax on taxpayers.  Depending on income, the personal tax would range from 0% of income (for those making 150% or less of the federal poverty level) to 8% for the wealthiest.  One’s personal contribution will never exceed $25,000 (this is relevant if you make more than $312,500 per year which, um, I don’t.)  On the state level, total personal taxation for these benifits will not exceed 3.9% of total personal income.  This means that the average personal expenditure will be less than 4%, although I do not have a sense of how this cost would be distributed across the population.

It looks like good legislation.  It looks like it can pay for itself.  From a personal perspective, Jennifer and I already pay roughly 2% our combined income for our portion of employer-paid health insurance, and another 2% in co-pays for prescription drugs, office visits, etc., and that is before I count in my hospitalizations required in 2001 ($150 apiece) and emergency room visits ($30 apiece.)  Even if our contribution had to double, or even triple, it would still be worth it to ensure that everyone in the state has health insurance.

I have read arguments for and against this measure, and really wrestled to see from the conservatives’ perspective, but still weighs in for me as overwhelmingly positive.  Thoughts?  Join the discussion page.

Looks like I’m a minor hit.  There was a post on MetaFilter about CSS art (basically, using a web browser to generate images in ways it was not designed to.)  Turns out I had already done this a couple years ago.  I quickly cleaned up my source code to ready it for release, and posted some sample images.  You can view the sample page (takes a while to load, probably only works in IE), the original image, the PERL script, and the MetaFilter discussion.

The guy who said “that’s beautiful” is quite kind.

Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.

Would you have invested?

Two hours ago I drank two liters of 100% juice, ate several pieces of bread and some cheese.  Walking around the building a few minutes ago I felt so dizzy that I thought I would fall down.  I went to the nurse’s station (one of the perks of Rockwell Scientific.)  My blood pressure is fine (diastolic a bit high), no sign of ear infection.  So the nurse took my blood sugar level.

67.  Two hours after a meal my blood sugar level should be between 110 and 170.  65 to 110 is the normal range for a fasting reading.  I called my doctor.  I’m waiting to hear back.

More to come as it unfolds.

OK, I just heard back.  The verdict?  Eat more protein, and more regularly.  Seems a bit facile, but it’s worth a shot.

Beautiful portraits of Japanese mushrooms (I’m not kidding.)  For a sampling of the different colors and geometries, check these links.  It’s really worth a look.  (Thanks to MeFi for the link.)

The Forbes Fictional Fifteen.  So who’s richer: Daddy Warbucks, Bruce Wayne, or J.R. Ewing?

At the Apotex Centre, Jewish Home for the Aged in Toronto, the dental clinic has no gas for anaesthesia.  When flu shots are offered, no one takes part.  Residents are afraid to report pain and weakness to nurses.  At night, flashlights are avoided by the staff, as are brisk walks in block-heeled shoes.  Residents are frightened of showers and hide food in their rooms.  Dining rooms and facilities are intentionally intimate and non-institutional.  When one adult child of a resident asked a construction company to take down the barbed wire surrounding a lot across the street, they did.

Half of the geriatric patients with dementia are Holocaust survivors.  And without short term memory, their past becomes their present.  Sixty years later, safe in a plush Canadian facility, the residents relive the Holocaust.

Remember the mcgees.org post about the Masai who donated fourteen blessed cows to the United States after they heard of the 11 September terrorist attacks?  How could Americans hope to repay such a touching gesture?

American tourists Edward A. Lefrak and Don Hutchins might have done a bit: Hutchins flew one of the tribe’s girls to the U.S., and Lefrak gave her a heart transplant.