Grikdog's Blog
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The Xochitl Sodality Wonders & Marvels Committee, Cedar Rapids Chapter
Grikdog's Blog |
g r i k d o g @ p o b o x . c o m |
The Blog Has Moved! http://grikdog.blogspot.com/more ... |
Atomic science experiment 
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What the left hand is doing, contd. (Epona's Song)
Epona's Song, from MIDI, by TablEdit Carbon Demo v2.64 (Ukulele, GCEA)
| | | | | | | |
|5---2---0---------------5---2---|0---------------5---2---0-------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|7-----------------------7-------|----------------7---------------|
| | | | | | | |
|2-------0-----------------------|------------------------4---5---|
|--------------------------------|2-------1-------2---------------|
|--------------------------------|6-------------------------------|
|--------2-----------------------|------------------------6-------|
| | | | | | | |
|2---------------5---------------|5-------4---2---0---------------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|----------------7---------------|12------11--9---7---------------|
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|5---2---0-------0-------5---2---|0-------5-------5---2---0---5---|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|2-------2---------------2---4---|7---------------7-------7-------|
| | | | | | | |
|2-------0-----------------------|------------------------4---5---|
|--------------------------------|2-------1-------2---------------|
|--------------------------------|6-------------------------------|
|4-------5-----------------------|------------------------6-------|
| | | | | | | |
|2---------------5---------------|7-------5-------12------10------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|--------------------------------|17------16----------------------|
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|5---2---0---------------5---2---|0---------------5---2---0-------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|--------------------------------|--------------------------------|
|7-----------------------7-------|----------------7---------------|
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|2-------0-----------------------|------------------------4---5---|
|--------------------------------|2-------1-------2---------------|
|--------------------------------|6-------------------------------|
|--------2-----------------------|------------------------6-------|
Created with TablEdit for Mac - http://www.tabledit.com/
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What the left hand is doing (on a ukulele)
1 2 3 4 • 5 6 • 7 8 9 • 10 11 12 13 14 15
A || Bb | B | C | C# | D | D# | E | F | F# | G | G# | A | Bb | B | C |
E || F | F# | G | G# | A | Bb | B | C | C# | D | D# | E | F | F# | G |
C || C# | D | D# | E | F | F# | G | G# | A | Bb | B | C | C# | D | D# |
G || G# | A | Bb | B | C | C# | D | D# | E | F | F# | G | G# | A | Bb |
1 2 3 4 • 5 6 • 7 8 9 • 10 11 12 13 14 15
So, tablature for the theme from Lon Lon Ranch/Epona's Song (midi) by Koji Kondo, from Ocarina of Time, MIGHT be suggested by this doubtful arrangement —
A: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C: --------------------------------------------------(hmmmm.... that's not it)-----------------------------------------
G: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
F D C F D C F D C D C B BbB E C#F F E D C F D C F D C F D C D C B BbB E F#E C C C C C D C BbA C G A A A A A B C B
Tabs suggest the duration of notes not at all, so picking this in equal measure produces no discernible tune.
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Bushman Jenny Soprano In the last 60 years, I've owned a uke. Recorder. Two and half fairly good guitars. A couple of cheap bongo sets. A dulcimer. Cheap school trumpet. And another ukulele, this one worth the money. more ... |
Gerudo Valley theme on the guitar (YouTube) more ... |
Squib more ... |
Froggie courtin' allies... — Jesus H. Christ [see Mark 9:40] "You're either with us or against us!" — George W. Bush, November 6, 2001 
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Who pulled the plug on my ISP...?? What? Yes, I pay Qwest for my DSL line, and Com-Link is my ISP. When Com-Link has trouble with "one of their upstream providers", Com-Link gets disconnected by someone who isn't Qwest. What am I paying for? Time to think about ISPs again? [UPDATE: Com-Link tells me what I rent from Qwest is copper, the physical wire in the ground. Everything else is the stuff doing the actual work. Nice racket, huh? Community broadband, anyone?] more ... |
Dead Like Me 
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The Rubaiyat of Benedict XVI You could ask yourself what Islam wants you to submit to. Submitting to the rigors of 14th century logic is probably not it, although, in that regard, it's worth noting that Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet and mathematician, broached issues in non-Euclidian geometry a full eight centuries before Bernhard Riemann.‡ So... The Pope says something stupid. And some Islamofascist in Mogadishu pops a cap in a nun to get even? Sorry, guys. A plague on both your houses. I think Mohammed has the right of it — a clear light in a quiet niche. 
Omar Khayyam's tomb in Naishapur, Iran
‡Omar was also beset by Mullahs in his old age, and forced to make a pilgrimage to Mecca to prove he was a "good Muslim." Khayyam, the astronomer and mathematician who reformed the Persian calendar a thousand years ago, would have been interested in a development just this week that allows most U.S. Muslims to begin (and end) their fasting month of Ramadan according to astronomical calculations, instead of pegging it to naked eye observation of the new crescent moon. On cloudy nights, the moon is not visible, and by tradition Ramadan is therefore postponed until the sighting is made. According to NPR this afternoon, that used to mess up a lot of daily life since nobody could know in advance when Ramadan was really going to to begin. Not anymore. I dunno, direct observation of the crescent moon sounds poetic to me. How's about, we keep that, and instead radical Islamists apologize to Omar? more ... |
WTF? 
George Soros has a point. The problem with the "War on Terror" is
that it's not a policy, it's a good old American mindf**k, as we used to call it in the Vietnam era.
"War on Terror" would be George Bush's license to kill, if it was actually winning any wars.
The absurd truth seems to be, there is no actual, winning "war" part of the "war on terror." If there was, Osama bin Laden would be dead, we'd have nuked the Hindu Kush in the second month of the fuss in Afghanistan, we'd be defoliating the Taliban poppy crop, and we wouldn't be pretending "you don't have to be like Saddam Hussein" in order to keep order in Iraq, when clearly you do, and clearly we've been doing it — to the point that the Baathist Party now supports American involvement in Iraq. George W. Bush, what a doofus. Was there ever a moment when anyone on Bush's staff knew that Saddam Hussein was a socialist, and that Al Qaeda hated his guts? I'm the same age as W, so I know he read Little Golden Books, especially the Uncle Remus stories about Br'er Fox and Br'er Rabbit. Especially, since we be talkin' Texicans here, the story of the Wonderful Tar Baby. Attention deficit disorder as a kid? more ... |
Explosive Reading 
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Gas Prices So...! Gas prices went down on Labor Day. Guess what's going UP the day AFTER Election Day? Gas prices?!? Ohhhh, very good. Give that rube a ceegar. 
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Laughing all the way to the prom 
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Crikey... 
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Why Galatea sucks [The nereid Galatea has also lent her name to several famous boats and ships.] more ... |
Good Guys and Bad Guys Who Have the Bomb 
Good Guys
Bad Guys
Actually, the nuclear map is fun to figure out. In World War II, the U.S., the Germans and the Japanese were all working on nuclear weapons. The Germans lost that race, but the United States and Japan both developed a working nuclear bomb in 1945. Hirohito surrendered before the Japanese could deploy their weapon, and that was that. Except... Joseph Stalin, a convinced dialectical materialist ideologue, realized that Russia had to have the bomb to keep Western capitalist imperialists from destabilizing the Russian Revolution, as they had tried to do twenty years earlier. Russia, he felt, absolutely must create a balance of terror with "the West", a term synonymous with the United States and its running dog lackeys, Japan, England and France — curiously enough, in that order. Russia and Japan had old issues dating back to Czarist sponsorship of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The lessons of Mutually Assured Destruction were lost on no one, of course. Under the shelter of Marxist ideology, China developed its own weapon, thereby procuring independence from resurgent militarism in Japan. Mao, you must recall, was also fighting the previous war! I'm not sure of the timeline, but France and England also developed their own bombs in the Fifties and Sixties. These are the most quixotic members of the nuclear club to date (with one exception), since no possible advantage accrues to nations so small that a nuclear exchange would have border-to-border implications. India developed her bomb on the Soviet model. Pakistan developed its bomb in reaction to the prospect of Indian reconquest and de-partition by force. There was even a brief clash between nuclear powers on the border between India and China, until the real interests of both powers clarified themselves. The exception, of course, is Israel, which never developed its own weapon. On the contrary, the United States gave Golda Maier her nuclear club membership — probably during John F. Kennedy's presidency, since Eisenhower (who understood the military-industrial complex!) would never have uncorked the nuclear genie. And it couldn't have been Lyndon B. Johnson, since Moshe Dayan clearly had the bomb during the Six Days War when he strafed the U. S. S. Liberty, an act Johnson forgave but clearly never forgot. JFK's motive for building up Israel's atomic technology was obviously to contain Communism. At this time, both Egypt and India were friendly with the Soviet Union. Kennedy probably felt a compelling need to have friendly nukes in Israel — at this time, unquestionably the United States' strategic ally. After the implosion of the Soviet Union, the world has changed. Older grievances than the strangely riveting Cold War have reasserted themselves. In other words, the Middle East that Cold Warriors like Condaleezza Rice and Paul Wolfovitz trained themselves for decades to see one particularly useful way no longer exists. From the point of view of U.S. realpolitik there is no discernible reason for Kennedy's Israel to exist, except old times' sake and sentiment. In other words, Japan and Israel have for decades occupied Battlestar Galactica roles in U.S. foreign policy, which places them high up on any non-inclusive list of triggers for Armageddon. Two obvious scenarios:
Obviously, reduced to irrelevance in real analysis, both Israel and Japan must wag the dog of American foreign policy as best they can. But the key phrase is reduced to irrelevance. An ancient player has re-emerged — the Islamic World Caliphate. The current intolerable status quo, with the United States blipped into the Iraqi tarbaby for the next decade, plays murkily into the hands of China. The squalid war in Iraq ironically underlines Saddam Hussein's tactics — implying that we can't win without becoming like Saddam, which the American people will not tolerate, so long as we are free to vote. At the same time, U.S. failure undermines Bush's so-called "Coalition of the WIlling," who become less eager to coalesce and more eager to discover opportunities to put their own stamp on events in the Middle East. Tony Blair's subservient England finds its role in the Middle East reduced from mandate to U.S. manacle-minder, with baffling repercussions on its own turf. With the entire panoply of players left over from the Cold War stultified and stalemated in the Middle East, only China stands to gain from the looming clash of civilizations. As the West abrades both itself and the Islamic World Caliphate from the Caucasus to Southeast Asia, China is free to repress its own Islamic minority just like everyone else, adopt a mein of benign but impotent concern, and inherit the world. more ... |
Harry and Trudy and Sam "What are you cussing about, Harry?" asked Trudy. "Yeah, I can tell," she said, directing the sass at Sam. "It's this consarned laptop," Harry rejoined. "You know, I really don't mind it when the feds put their consarned spyware on my laptop." Sam winked at Trudy. Trudy said, "Then why are you cussing, Harry?" "For the kind of taxes I pay, you'd think they could debug their stuff. I get tired of it, you know. Consarned buggy spyware." "Why do you think the feds have put spyware on your laptop, Harry?" "'Cause I know they can't read my mind otherwise, what did you say her name was, Sam?" "Trudy," said Sam. "Trudy. See?" Harry tipped his porkpie. It was lined with aluminum foil. "Say, Harry," said Trudy. "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" 
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Inform 7 
This is about the coolest and most desuetudinous program I've ever seen,
because it is an IDE (!) for Inform, a system of compilers, libraries and
philosophies intended to help programmers write Text Adventure Games — on the old,
extremely portable Infocom Z-Code model — which nobody ever
plays these days. Phenomenally beautiful program, phenomenally ephemeral utility ...
but an idea which will not or can not die. I'll have to look into this...
Curiously, even though the Mac OS X version is written for Tiger (10.4.x), it seems to run just fine (at first blush, anyway) on Panther (10.3.9). more ... |
Michelle Wie's new caddy... 
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Maid to order 
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Holy Fans of Phlogiston, Batman! more ... |
It's an off-year election, Newt! more ... |
Pirate party...?? 
What about that Israeli commando raid inside Lebanon yesterday? Ceasefire, what ceasefire? Doh! Like Hezbollah (and every bookie outside Tel Aviv) couldn't see that one coming? Maybe Mohammed is the Seal of the Prophets because the mistakes being made these days are ... well ... [insert Eisnerville caesura] ... obvious? So... If History
repeats herself, who in the Middle East is Sparta, who the Helots?
Did you know Spartan women could jump and kick themselves in the ass with their own two heels, simultaneously? Apparently, so can the Israelis. A strangely formidable sight, especially if, like me, you can imagine the spirit of Golda Meier wearing a Life With Mama dark blue dress with white polkadots and flailing away like knees don't matter, urging her menfolk laconically on to greater and deadlier ferocity. Against the eerie, backbeat ululation of a quarter billion† Arab women, the subsonic thunder of twenty million‡ self-motivated yentas hammering their fundaments (and then the earth) with pitiless calcanii. Scary, scary stuff. Downright apocalyptic. Oy, such a vision! †Astutely observed! Yes, this is a made-up fact. ‡Another made-up fact. The ratio between these two numbers is approximately the same as Injuns to Troopas at the Little Big Horn. more ... |
Old Photos 
Oh, hell. After years of looking for ANOTHER SUSPECT because the Ramseys hired a good lawyer so we can't BLAME THE PARENTS because we can't BLAME THE VICTIM (who's only six), let's just get on with crucifying the SCHOOL TEACHER by comparing his mug shot to a decade of PSYCHIC SKETCHES! (Spare us this guy's CONFESSIONAL VOYEURISM, though. Seriously.) AAAaaaaaaaagh! This case was MADE for Zippy the Pinhead! more ... |
After Lebanon, Logorrhea When law fails, when Right makes Might, then war is about whose side had fewer self-inflicted delusions — and even then, war involves a horrible throw of the dice, doesn't it? It's right to ridicule delusion. When delusion starts swinging chains and cocking zip guns, ridicule might even be a moral imperative. You don't decide blame or guilt in a court of law, once the fighting stops. That is hypocrisy of a high, high order. No. Law is poured golden from the crucibles of Hell. War is ridicule by other means. The winners hang the losers on the nearest convenient gallows, if they dare, while widows and orphans pile rocks on everybody's dead. Fight! urges the Bhagavad Gita. It does not promise victory. more ... |
A modest proposal 
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Requiescat in Pace 
It's difficult to imagine the grandeur of these huge enclosed spaces... I once stood transfixed for three or four long seconds as a clumsy squirrel belly flopped through eighty feet of empty air to the pavement below. He slapped the deck hard, and after a moment or two of obviously stinging pain, waddled gingerly away. more ... |
What?! No more bananas?! 
If you think the tough necked, hard to peel bananas you buy in stores these days are nothing like the bananas
you ate as a kid, you're absolutely right. It turns out the ubiquitous banana is doomed to extinction in 10 years or less by
Panama disease, a tropical fungus plague. The only hope to "Save the Banana" is to hybridize it with
a coarser, hardier banana relative, the plantain. Plantains are bigger, starchier, tougher and shaped like Viking boats.
The few perfect yellow Cavendish bananas in grocery stores these days, it seems, were bred to replace an earlier (and far better) banana variety, the Gros Michel (which Chiquita calls the "Big Mike" for us dumb Americans), which rotted out of commerce back in the days of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez. What a pity! What a crying shame! Losing all the American Elm trees that turned the city streets of my kidhood into green cathedrals was bad enough. But bananas, too? more ... |
Alert Alert Bush's strategy is the same as Napoleon's — to avoid the inevitable reckoning by waging ever wider war as long as possible. Bush's 1812 probably comes in 2012, when John McCain, the last Republican President in American history, fails to win re-election and the whole Neocon kit and caboodle gets frogmarched off to Nuremberg. 
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Lieberman, Loser
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Fanny Sunesson, where are you? 
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Text Wrangler 
I've been a fan of BBEdit for years, but it's gotten long in the tooth. Fortunately, the authors have released Text Wrangler, which shares enough of the old BBEdit interface to seem familiar but it's improved overall.
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Who was Mohammad Amin al-Husayni?  Just before Ari ben Canaan (Paul Newman) realizes that some of his best friends were Arabs in the seldom-resurrected Oscar winner† Exodus (1960), we see a preposterous episode straight out of Hogan's Heroes in which a former Waffen SS Kommandant indicates that now (in 1948) he works for Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, instead of Adolf Hitler, der defunkter Fuhrer.
To its credit, the movie does quote the Mufti's reaction to the U.N. vote to partition Palestine into "the state of Israel and a separate but equal Arab state" (in 1960, the Civil Rights movement was just getting under weigh, so quizzical reaction to that ironic turn of phrase is entirely anachronistic) — to wit, that a bunch of gentlemen in Flushing Meadows (i.e., the members of the United Nations) have no right to divide up his country. †Best score The image right is another item that Wikipedia's diligent content wranglers have found unsuitable for inclusion. more ... |
Favorite scenes in favorite movies 
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Caddie? What Caddie? 
[Oh, well. Like the world's coming to an end, or something.............] more ... |
It's almost like somebody reads this thing...  The Israelis are now showing only steely-eyed Paul Newman visage in their war propaganda, although seldom do you see a squatting soldier with that shell-shocked, longview stare flicking coy glances at the camera lens. I'd have said John Wayne, but Marion "The Duke" Morrison was a Republic Pictures scene decorator who never heard a shot fired in anger in his life. At least Newman served with the political arm of the Irgun, if memory serves.
All Al Jazeera shows is bombed-out U.N. observation posts and dead kids in Qana. Man, that's so four days ago. more ... |
Naiveté This is a point Robert McNamara learned in 1995, when he went to Vietnam to discuss the errors of the war with his Vietnamese counterparts, namely, that failing to appreciate the other side's viewpoint can have grave consequences in a world too nuclear as it stands. I could be wrong, but what if Israel started addressing the grievances of Hezbollah, and Hezbollah started addressing the grievances of Israel ... one by one? Couldn't you postpone the question of whether Israel has a right to exist, and just sort of creep up on the question some sunny morning a thousand years from now? Wouldn't that Israel and that Hezbollah be long forgotten? War is not the answer. Maybe pretending to be pirates and playing nice is. 
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Knock on wood... [UPDATE: Michelle Wie won $255,333 for her second-place finish at the Evian Masters. She finished one stroke back from Karrie Webb, tied with Laura Davies at 15 under par.] more ... |
The War for Wikipedia: 2006 Israel-Lebanon Conflict My personal opinion is that it's just textbook IDF doctrine, Moshe Dayan's old "mad dog" standard for Israeli defense. You'll recall he bombed the U.S.S. Liberty (1967 June 8), a deliberate act also followed by profuse official regrets and lamentations, just like today's. The old berserker rage seems to have been devalued by the first Israeli pullout from Lebanon, though — at least, Hezbollah seems to be striking its own insane emblem over the old Israeli coin. 
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A: Peking Duck? (Forget about understanding this. You'd have to remember things like hegemony, "distant barbarians," and Kissinixonger on the Great Wall in 1972, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone...) 
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Resurrection mist: Don't leave home without it! more ... |
Just dumb, I guess  I'm not sure what a "strategic ally" is, or why Israel is the United States' best one of those. Is there a U.S. Naval Base in Tel Aviv? Do we stockpile nuclear weapons in Negev? Does the U.S. Air Force carry on from Nazareth? Is Gitmo reopening in Herzliya Pituah?
Or... Strategic... Hmmmm... you mean, like oil? Do we import oil from Israel? If so, why aren't we buying it direct from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Russia...? What DO we import from Israel in a strategic way, aside from Dreamworks and a few electronic components for the U.S. Air Force and NASA? It's stupid, being ignorant like this, but geopolitics was never my strong suit in college. I've got to wonder about Israel, though. If my goal was to settle the entire world supply of everyone the same tribe as me in every corner of one place slightly smaller than New Jersey, I'd sure pick the exact center of all my traditional blood enemies. It's a bit like Custer at the Little Big Horn, in a way. Sure, Crazy Horse is outgunned. Hasn't got a chance, really. Personally, if I had been Lord Balfour at that seemingly innocuous moment in English history (November 2, 1917), I'd have picked Switzerland for the new Zion. It's surrounded by mountains. You can bloody well defend Switzerland. But that was then. These days, were I looking for U.S. strategic allies, I'd pick Mexico for obvious reasons (volunteer slave labor), followed by Canada, Japan, the E.U., and so on. Israel would be dead last on my list, kind of like a perennially suicidal kid sister. You might love her, despite the angst and aggravation, but you get tired of her late night dramatics and you know one desperate midnight she'll win her angry argument with herself. Nope. In my book, Japan makes perfect sense as a strategic ally. For one thing, almost 99% of the world's coolest affordable toys, including Hondas, Sonys and Nikons, come from Japan. Japan is the world's toymaker. And the Japanese Archipelago makes kind of a neat staging area for U.S. invasions of North Korea, doesn't it? Like Josef Stalin used to say, it's not what you pledge NOT to do that counts. It's what you CAN do when your Neocon administration blows a mental gasket. Interestingly, Lord "Bloody" Balfour created two world insurgencies in his long, masterful life — the entire current crop of Islamic jihadists ... and the Irish Republican Army. more ... |
Ann Coulter, no. Lili Estefan, si. Instead of that, here's a link to the real La Flaca, Lili Estefan. 
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Cut, cut! "This is not some girl power thing, either. I fully believe in [Michelle's] equally inept playing partner on Friday, Jeff Gove, having the inalienable right to be marginal at PGA Tour events as well." 
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Cedar Rapids Gazette drops Coulter In short, she is what John Dean is calling a Conservative without Conscience, i.e., a member of the Karl Rove blackshirts who have captured and are now being lodged in the Goldwater right wing without due process. I greatly admire rhetoric, even or especially savage rhetoric, so Coulter still has a place in my pantheon of evils. Next to Magda Goebbels. Unfortunately, her bombshell blonde appearance, while pleasing, seems to be matched by the acid frustration of a woman who has either been edited (or edited herself) out of the gene pool. I was hoping she would hook up with some Rear Admiral and quietly disappear into a cloud of private bliss. Heh. 
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2006 U.S. Women's Open results more ... |
Varicose brained remarks Some of the other remarks at the U.S. Women's Open were as blithely varicose brained as that "packed like Sardinians in a tenement" crack by Bud Collins at Wimbledon a few decades ago. My favorite was the "slump for American women" that has, by default, allowed a regrettable Korean ascendency (Se Ri Pak, Birdie Kim, et al.) in women's golf of late. Uhhh... maroons? Michelle Wie is a member of the set of American women golfers. Her ascendency has the potential to last fifty years. Get used to it. 
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U.S. Women's Open: Michelle Wie's scorecard 
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Grassley's modest proposal Lord. Truly, law is the Devil’s plaything. Aside from this being the slippery slope to Sharia, the reenactment of Kansas Blue Laws and confiscating the cash registers and personal wallets of HyVee employees who sell beer to minors, I can’t figure out what’s got the wind up ol’ Chuck’s chimney so bad. He’s not up for re-election until 2010, so all’s I can figure is, he’s trying to blow sand in the eyes of Iowans who really, really think Bush has blown it Big Time on Iraq. Hmmmmmm... Maybe I do see something. Grassley has never been known to criticize a government waste whistle-blower too harshly (if at all, waste seepage stanching is his stock in trade)... So my guess is, he’s sided with the New York Times, a pillar of the Republic since long before Bush’s granddaddy was a twinkie, so Chuck is trading a little behind-the-scenes hardball with Karl Rove for an up-front sin sop to the Christian wingnuts, most of whom aren’t even Iowans. Sheesh. It’s just a theory. Like evolution? more ... |
Sheehan speaks 
I see Patty Sheehan, my other favorite golfer of all time, thinks 16-year-old Michelle Wie is doing just fine, thank you, so leave the kid alone.
Her, and Arnold Palmer, and anyone else with a clear-eyed grok on the future... ;-)
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Hmmmm... All too easy... I belong to the overwhelming force school, evidently, and spent a lot of time levelling up in Leviabor Ruins. more ... |
Spoiler 
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Things ...Things... more ... |
Nusa Beach 
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Where's the ILGWU in the People's Republic of Capitalism? more ... |
The veils are beginning to fall...! 
My current favorite game, Star Ocean: Blue Sphere, is written in Japanese, but I've begun to insinuate myself into meanings :)
And what fun it is! It turns out that Noel and Chisato are your intelligence experts. Noel can cast a scan over monsters to discover their strengths and weaknesses, while Chisato, ace girl reporter that she is, can snap their photos. This information gets collated into The Big Book of Monsters, which is the second item in your list under Keys (far right, the key icon). Those monster reports are a gold mine of information, because (among other things) they tell you what monsters might drop when you take them out. The Assassin Ant, e.g., which is rendered as a single pixel (!) on the Game Boy Color screen, lugs a gigantic gold piece around; and while the lowly Wato (a war robot made on the cheap, evidently) yields only scrap iron, some of its more heavily endowed brothers drop gold ingots and other goodies when they haul over and die. Naturally, Japanese websites have precompiled all this stuff (in Japanese, of course ;-) I'd have to say, one of the best sites out there is Ultimate Sphere, a cut above the rest, mainly because it includes all the SOBS kanji. Reduces eyestrain! Thank you, Ultimate Sphere! more ... |
Glossary 
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June 8, 1967 
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Village People 
The musical group seems to have learned at the knees of the masters...
That's not bad, though. Japanese have to hire private detectives and do research to discriminate against 2% of their countrymen, who are otherwise indistinguishable by language, DNA or race from poor (but non-burakumin) Japanese. Almost enlightened, by U.S. standards. We white Americans discriminate against 30% of our countrymen (all U.S. citizens) based on race. Us Caucasians are a shiftless, lazy lot who can't be bothered with mental or financial effort. And that doesn't even include thousands of illegal immigrants who speak Spanish, a heckuva convenience for rednecks who may not be certain if some white folks are on the hate list. more ... |
Dear Diary more ... |
Wiktionary? 
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Post-election Analysis More curiouslier, something like this also explains why John McCain can't get his party's nomination for chief cat wrangler. It's his bland. McCain stays cool when the situation demands a screaming fit. Since everybody knows McCain is naturally sarcasticklier than a vat of sulfuric acid, nobody believes the Mr. Rogers act, and it's biting him in the ass. more ... |
Dad-gum Slytherins! 
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The mental picture is bad enough more ... |
Another fig from ever fewer thistles [Updated] This passage is usually explained away as a reference to "fruitless Israel," since it occurs in the vicinity of Jerusalem. But such a reading is not necessary. Jesus, called Rabbi, is familiar with the Torah. The story is not about figs, or trees, but about results — it's about Time and Timelessness, the Beginning and The End, Alpha and Omega; in other words, it's about Jesus, famously the fruit of the womb. The fig tree is a cautionary tale — no fruit, and there goes the whole damned tree, blasted root and branch by a vengeful deity of some sort. But there's another tree in the Bible, isn't there? — the Tree of Life. The point of the story is not the Fig, but the Vine. The alternative, the unexpected twist. The other tree, the family tree, not the poor doomed fig tree but the Tree of Life — that yields first Mary, then Jesus — so it turns out to be a co-redemption parable in which Mary is the new Eve (the one who gets it right), in which ultimately all of Nature, and immediately all of humanity, is intimately, mutually co-implicated in its own redemption. (C. S. Lewis discusses the redemption of nature in Mere Christianity, IIRC.) Co-implication? Mind blowing stuff for us Buddhists, let me tell you! But you have to understand the story in the fourth dimension, in Time and Space. And that loses almost everyone (even your eyes are glazing over, I can tell!) Well, I hate amateur exegesis, too, so enough of that... 
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Hey, today is my unbirthday, too! more ... |
Banana Crackers #473 — Oscar Wilde more ... |
Ring Ring...  « BACK | RANDOM | LIST | NEXT » Not a very large webring, actually — parts of it have eroded under the relentless indifference of web entropy — but it turns up fascinating stuff like this. Evidently, fans crib off each other just as voraciously in Japan as elsewhere ;-) By the way...
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Got SOBS? Star Ocean: Till the End of Time (SO3) has way too many toolmarks on it for my taste — paths to interesting areas are simply blocked, obvious visual cues such as ladders and roofs lead nowhere, and so on. Also, the characters in SO3 are blank and expressionless, like dolls, whereas the "primitive" animations in SO2 (and now in SOBS) actually suggest far more in the way of character development. And SOBS is the direct sequel to SO2 — meaning, in large part, that it has a sense of humor (ok, ok, you do have to read Japanese to get the jokes, but they're there...) I do enjoy the original Star Ocean (SO1), and while I have the game, I don't have the SNES console, so I've had to play it in emulation. I've gotten far enough into the original to understand that the Time Gate on Styx (SO3) is what happens when you relinquish creative control of your storyline to another team. Ugh. 
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Are snail darters important? In other words, the focus should not be on the snail darter, but on the niche that created snail darters when the entire rest of the ecosystem gridlocked eons ago into a stable, post-Ice Age ecology. That empty hole is going to be filled, and Nature guarantees that human concerns will not be consulted by whatever novel hoobiyahs come next to darn the tears and stitch the tatters. In other, other words, can you say, e.g., Ebola? Hanta? H5N1? Get the picture? 
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Vatican astronomer: Can this guy last? “...He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because it harked back to the days of "nature gods" who were responsible for natural events. 
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Lisa 2.5 Documentation Files 
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What...?! 
[SKT Open: Michelle Wie's march into the history books was foreshortened a bit when the SKT Open in Incheon, Korea was rained out yesterday. The third round, interrupted yesterday by the downpour, becomes today's final round — making it a 54-hole tournament. Same number as on Wie's baseball uniform in the pre-tournament hoopla. An omen?] more ... |
Wie makes the cut at SKT Open in Incheon, Korea!  What’s this? Wie can’t stand her caddie, either? (Elbow in the ribs, head tilted away, etc. Great body language. Guess whose contract is expiring slowly, slowly in the wind...)
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Make the cut?! How's about finishing fifth, or better? 
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Strange... .jpg)
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ChinesePod.com 
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. — Susan Ertz [another Unix fortune cookie] more ... |
Today's Unix fortune cookie The common cormorant, or shag, Lays eggs inside a paper bag; The reason, you will see, no doubt, Is to keep the lightning out. But what these unobservant birds Have failed to notice is that herds Of bears may come with buns And steal the bags to hold the crumbs. more ... |
i.P.O.S. [UPDATE BELOW] 
[UPDATE, 21 April 2006: After retrieving my iPod a la funk from the trash and wiping off the sauerkraut, I was able to reset the pup blind (with power off, apparently). Then, when I plugged it into my iBook, it came right up. But it's still a P.O.S.: I paid over $400 for the aggravation, three lousy weeks before the minimum iPod size jumped from 5 Mb to 10 Mb. Don't tell me, I already know: For “only” $59 more, Apple will replace my battery. Steal of a deal...] more ... |
Free Lunch ... er ... Linux from Ubuntu 
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The legend continues 
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JapanesePod101.com, again 
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JapanesePod101.com 
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Fever... MORONI: He’s not on television, David. He’s on the radio.Like a dream, he faded away.... Fantastic! Three of my favorite golfers [viz.: Wie, Ochoa, Webb] in the top three at the Kraft Nabisco Championship, and Michelle Wie takes home $108,222 with her this evening. If Wie ever figures out how Natalie Gulbis played Chrissie Evert's girl power games with her head all afternoon ("just look at this thumbnail"), she'll have to share a bit less of the loot next time. more ... |
Guan Yu 
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Wie is 4 back at the Kraft Nabisco after two rounds more ... |
iPod settlement check more ... |
Rush Limbaugh dies and goes to ... ah ... more ... |
Ambivalence 
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Schlock and Awful |
