High to the stick side

During one of the intermissions of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup, some lucky fan won $150K for shooting a goal against an NHL goalie. He went high to the stick side. Now if only the Flames had followed his lead. Though they were plagued by stupid penalties--you don't give the opposing team a 2-man advantage five minutes into the first period and expect to walk away unscathed. And that last 5:00 major penalty for elbowing was BAD. Stupid bad. But now we'll have hockey until Game 6 or so, which is good since I'm not totally sure we'll even have a season this fall.

Been a day of sorting and cleaning, mostly. Went through a bunch of filing upstairs, found some books I've been meaning to read, noticed that I'm finally caught up on all the Ultimate Spider-Man trades. And I've got a complete set of the Astro Boy reprints now. Much Osamu Tezuka goodness for a while.

Another Memorial Day come and gone (it is 9:30 as I write this) and I keep thinking about my grandfather. He was in WW II as a cook in the Army. He didn't see combat that I know of, but he was part of the occupation force of Japan. There's a book of photos he took while there that I should get as part of my inheritance, and much of it is the bombed-out cityscape. Now 50 years later they've dedicated a mediocre memorial to all of the soldiers in that war, in the middle of another. There's no memorial to the Spanish-American War, is there? This is the closest analogue I can think of, really. An imperial war fought for the wrong reasons with suspicious press involvement. OK, that's also Vietnam to some extent.

In any case, we're currently making a new generation of soldiers who will gather somewhere years from now and remember their buddies, men and women who not long ago were wearing prom dresses and serving ice cream. Now, in the words of Pat Tillman's brother, they're fucking dead. Somehow I doubt that will look good on a memorial, but I think most everyone would want their loved ones living and breathing again. Instead, we're throwing people into a meat grinder so Bush can have a trophy in the White House. (There's a story going around the blogs that Bush takes great pride in showing visitors a gun that Hussein was carrying when he was captured. How many died for this? We're over 800 dead Americans now, and June 30 means nothing.)

Hrm. I should think of something more cheerful before going to bed. Here was my dream from last night...

The only thing I really remember is having some bugs in the bathroom. These bugs (there were two of them) were beetles, and they had been in stasis for a couple hundred years--I had pulled them out of some sort of pepper grinder, and they had originally looked liked liked dried anise bits.

It turns out the bugs were some sort of doomsday bug, and people were looking for them. The bugs were crawling around the drain of some bathtub, rehydrating and growing in size--soon they were too big to fit down the drain. Oh, and did I mention this was on a movie set? As I was trying to figure out what to do with the doomsday beetles, a director and an actress were trying to work out a scene--something about Portland being the cruelest city of all.

Add to that the dream I had about the David Niven Pavilion, and I'm beginning to wonder what my subconscious is doing these days...

I'm doing laundry!

One of the early episodes of the late, lamented animated The Tick series had the big blue guy attempt to do laundry. This later involved mole men, courtship of a supermodel, and a giant lava man in a diaper.

Man, they do not make TV like that anymore. I miss that show. They are bringing Invader ZIM to DVD, but no animated Tick. Come on, Fox. I know you people have your heads up your asses, but Family Guy is your best seller. Wake up and smell the coffee.

So I'm doing laundry and trying to figure out why my dream last night involved the something called the David Niven Pavilion, which was the exclusive territory of Intel employees. I also dreamt of a complete script guide to Mystery Science Theater 3000 that I was showing to Spatch. That I can see since Spatch and I have liked that show for a decade or so.

Playing a bit of Metal Arms: Glitch in the System this afternoon. I love Metal Arms, but it makes me swear a lot. It's very unforgiving and there's no mapping to speak of. Add in some murky objectives and a very dark palette, it's not surprising the sales weren't stellar. On the other hand, it has exploding robots, robots that scream bloody murder if you shoot at them, and mechanics that swear like sailors. It makes me laugh. One hopes that someday Swinging Ape will be able to revisit that world.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and then back to work for a day. After that, we'll be taking a trip to Denver. Not sure what we'll do there.

Crescent Fresh

MTV2 must be following the same path as MTV. They're playing Sifl and Olly, which I don't mind. Only I thought the whole point of MTV2 was to play videos.

Hey, Calgary won game three. Looks like Tampa Bay had trouble stopping Jerome Iginla.

Sifl: And you know the problems I've been having stopping Jerome Iginla.

Olly: You've got some serious-ass stopping Jerome Iginla problems.

ESPN would do well to hire puppets for color commentary.

Oh my. Watching TV, I see why traffic was so shitty on Thursday. Somebody in an SUV jumped the curb and hit a woman walking her dog on the Morrison Bridge. Killed her, injured the dog.

Speaking of depressing news, June 30 is approaching. We're gonna fix everything when we hand over Iraq to... somebody. Oh yeah. Ourselves. It's gonna be great. Wait. What's that you say? Nine American soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan today?

It's a good thing they finally sorted out the WW II memorial this weekend. They're going to need to start planning the Gulf War memorial at this rate.

Produce Panic

Note to self: play this at work on Tuesday.

(Insert obligatory rant about lack of cross-platform development.)

Playing a game of HeroQuest with Reza, Michael, and the rest of the gang. My current character is a Kralorelan (an analogue of China in the world of Glorantha, whose inhabitants are the only people in the world who don't fear dragons), and I'm playing him as sort of the Old Master character from Feng Shui. This is a Borderlands campaign so we're not all Roman/Saxon analogues like in other campaigns I've done in this system. Which is refreshing, since playing a band of illiterate cattle-based religious zealots gets old after a while.

Instead we're playing a rag-tag group of people from various nationalities, some of whom distrust each other. We have one language in common--I've decided that in addition to being a martial arts wizard, this old man (Master Wang Chi) is doing a pretty good Chekov impression. Keptin, did you know quadrotriticale was a Russian invention? Plus I make everyone eat my noodles, which I'm not good at making. He's a fun character to play.

It's Memorial Day, and I see from dailyKos that Bush the Elder pushed Clinton at the opening ceremony. I mean, the hell? Way to go, Bush. I suppose we should be thankful he didn't throw up on the Big Dog.

L Dopa and Devil Crayon are having a housewarming party tonight. I couldn't find a decent fare down to SF, alas. But we'll be there in August. Curse this time and geography crap.

Ennui, party of one

At least it didn't take me an hour to get home today. Well, it did but we stopped by Trader Joe's first.

Played a bit more of Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Now I was a huge fan of Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation. Played it a ton, beating it enough to get the stealth and the secret costume and the unlimited ammo, etc. But this version...?

OK, it's pretty. It may, in fact, be the best-looking game on the GameCube, even more stunning than Metroid Prime or Mario Sunshine. On the other hand, either I am just too used to the PlayStation controller, I'm too old to do these games anymore, they've seriously upped the difficulty of the game, or I'm just drinking away too many brain cells. Because it's not as fun.

With all the graphic improvements, they've added in the things about Metal Gear Solid 2 that I despised. The first-person shooting is pretty neat, but in order to do anything with it you've got to move three controls simultaneously. If you're going to make using the first-person aiming mandatory, make a first-person game. Do something Half-Life or CounterStrike or any of the hundreds of other games out there. Don't make players whip back and forth between first and third.

And if you're going to remake the game, fix the things that are weird and annoying, like the fact that all the bad guys can walk around with machine guns, but you don't get one until an hour or so into the game. Blah. (On a side note, I want somebody to bring back the first/second-person goodness that was Shining the Holy Ark for the Saturn. And Saturn Bomberman. And Dragon Force. And...)

We got our estimate back from the painter on the house. It's double what I expected. Granted, my expectations were probably unrealistic. I dunno. There are options, of course. Though some of them (like say a realistic-paying job) are unlikely.

I'm beginning to feel like I did a year ago. On multiple levels.

Determining correct file permissions...

Apple released a system update for OS X 10.3.4 today. So after downloading the 41 MB update, I've installed it and now it's time to repair disk permissions. (Why Apple installers always munge disk permissions is beyond me.)

Monday is a holiday, so the roads were really quiet this morning. Maybe everybody is staying home drunk, realizing they are in a world where Sean Hannity can compare MoveOn.org to the Klan. I know that the guy is a complete tool, but come on. Add in the news that Bill Janklow, in addition to killing a motorcyclist while speeding, also had over 200 secret pardons to his friends while governor of South Dakota, and it's a wonder anybody takes the GOP and its ilk seriously.

Oh yeah. They run all three branches of government. But it's too hard, if you believe Dennis Hastert.

Did a bit of writing last night. I've had this story idea in my head for a while, so it was interesting to work on. Then I had another one this morning. Next you'll see me working on my resume...

All things considered, though, I need some coffee.

Beware the ANGRY FINGER

So Kevin and I were talking today about The Hunt for Red October. It's better because Alec Baldwin is more Jack Ryan than Harrison Ford, says I.

But no, says the Kevin. There is no ANGRY FINGER in Red October.

What is the Angry Finger? Since this is the Internet, people with more time on their hands than I have already done the work.

I mention this mostly because it took me over an hour to drive home today. Something about rain and multiple car accidents. Whenever rain falls for the first time in a while, it confuses and frightens Oregonians. Oh no! Some water from the sky! Let me brake suddenly and violently!

Oh, and did I mention Calgary losing Game Two? World, I am pointing my angry finger at you.

New look

I was getting eyestrain with the old template, so I moved to a new one. More as it develops.

Anybody got a NeXT cube lying around?

I have Rick Astley songs running through my head all morning.

I can't decide if this is better or worse than Air Supply.

Debating about going to DSL and turning our iMac Moby Grape into a server of sorts. I'm not sure if it would keep cool enough to run constantly. Might be worth a try, though. Right now it's just collecting dust upstairs. I know. I need a NeXT Cube.

Probably another project I'll think about and then abandon, sorta like my quest to wire the whole house with 10-base-T. Though really, with wireless I'm glad I didn't do that since now I would be kicking myself.

Finally beat Ratchet and Clank 2 last night, which was fun. I'd like to play it a bit more, but rumor has it that the house has reached saturation level with that game. Maybe I'll go try something else.

But first, coffee.

Testify

Go ahead and read this speech by Al Gore and tell me that he's just the same as Bush or too much of an egghead to be president or we've accomplished some mission in Iraq or whatever other lie you want to spout.

Go ahead. I'll just be here wondering what karma we are burning off in this administration. Other than the activities done in our name for the last... two hundred years.

Hobson's choice

I had this really long blog entry here but it's mostly just dark and depressing so I won't bore you with it.

Part of it is the news from Iraq. Part of it is the economy. Part of it is... well, whatever. I don't know.

We will return you to our normal broadcasts just as sure as we know what normal is.

I told you I was ill.

OK, so I'm no Spike Milligan. But I have been coughing a lot today--more so than yesterday when I was saying to myself, I really don't feel all that bad anymore...

Had a lovely night out and I watched most of game 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Jerome Iginla's short-handed goal was a thing of beauty. I think I'm mostly cheering for Calgary this year, though Tampa Bay has a certain underdog quality that I like. On the other hand, it is in Florida and Florida is the source of much evil.

I have Hero on DVD already, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to see it on the big screen. It's a combination of Rashomon with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a tiny dash of The Legend of Fong Sai Yuk. The latter is a must-see, if you haven't already. About the only thing it's missing is a giant robot. Unlike Brotherhood of the Wolf, though, I have no idea how they could have fit one in.

English poseur

When I was an English major, I had this theory about the students in the program. There were the people who were interested in langauge, and then there were the poseurs that settled on it as a default major because they couldn't think of anything else. They were the folks that never did the reading, never talked in class, etc.

Thanks to daisyglaze, there's a meme going around the journals I actually want to do.

The CollegeBoard list of great books
The ones I've read are in bold and I will annotate and stuff. Note that I am not even gonna touch the idea of the canon or what it really means to be familiar with great books. We could argue this list all day.

?, - Beowulf (Grendel should probably be here, too...)
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (Jasper Fforde will probably make more sense to me when I finally get to this.)
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (There's a new translation of this that I just picked up and will start Real Soon Now)
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (I would also add A Christmas Carol and pretty much everything else, actually.)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Took an entire course on slave narratives, actually. Man, I miss Fred Moten)
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier (I am indebted to Brooks Landon for pointing out that this book is best read in the voice of Emo Phillips)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I took an entire course on Ulysses, too. That should count for something.)
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (We sang "The Tell-Tale Heart" in show choir once, too)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 (This and Gravity's Rainbow are on my list of books to read...)
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac (Also on my list)
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (again, on my list)
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet (I'd also argue for the inclusion of Merchant of Venice and Henry V in this list, even though they're kind of problematic.)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (Bunches of times)
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath (I liked Travels With Charley a lot, too.)
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden (There is a great children's book based on this, too, called Henry Hikes to Fitchburg.)
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace (on the list, too)
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (This book is just fascinating on so many levels, and you can talk about the criticism almost as much as the book itself)
Voltaire - Candide (We watched this in an opera class, too, if you can believe it.)
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Harrison Bergeron (Not this one but a ton of others)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (What, not The Importance of Being Earnest?)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

The beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot.

Back from the airport, which is always a treat. Now I'm ingesting some coffee in an effort to get rid of the last part of my cold. It appears to be mostly gone, which is cool.

Currently full of plans for the bathroom and the house. But it's holistic. We can't paint the house until we trim the hedge. And we can't trim the hedge until we get another bid. And I'd like to paint the interior of the house but I need to clean out the basement. Hrm. Milk and Cheese always recommended fire as the Biblical cleanser. You should listen to them. They are dairy products gone bad.

I never drank coffee until I left the Midwest and moved to Stumptown. But after my last trip back, I'm not as surprised, even though I was the poster child for caffeine intake--I was a night owl college student who read too much with a marked tendency towards procrastination. The coffee in the Midwest is... not good. In fact, quite bad.

But here we have Stumptown Coffee and Coffee People and Coffee Plant along with Starbucks and the other chains. And who can forget Peet's Coffee? One of the many fine things to come out of the Bay Area, really. Then there's tea. I haven't been drinking as much tea lately. It's almost getting too hot for it now, and then there's complete lack of infrastructure for tea at work.

In political news, I see Bush is going to give a speech tonight. However, it's not going to be covered on ABC, NBC, or CBS. Just on CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews. Hrm. His approval ratings in the last poll were at 37% or so, but his approval of networks appears to be much lower. I mean, he's not going be on ESPN Classic or Lifetime...

New Old Lompoc, perhaps?

So I will try entering this again since Mozilla crashed on me the first time. I blame the New Cruelty.

Both of us are sick in the house of Giant Robots, but that doesn't stop us from running errands. We donated stuff to Goodwill (books, some shoes, a bunch of clothes), had brunch, then off to get comics (mostly Ultimate Spider-Man and some back issues of The Red Star) and then we got some bathroom stuff at one of the big box stores.

Then I spent some time installing the hardware in the bathroom. It came with some drywall anchors, that involved drilling a 5/16" hole and then inserting some special bits in. But I had some screw-in anchors that didn't involve drilling massive holes and used those instead. Except for one part where I ran into actual wood and just used that as an anchor.

So celebrations all around for being a manly-man giant fighting robot. Perhaps we'll head to the Hedge House, which has Old Lompoc beers and is a hop, skip, and a jump from Pix Patisserie.

Perhaps this cold is finally over. Though I am still sleeping a lot and my neck was just a mass of pain when I woke up. I dunno.

*cough* *hack*

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had a horrible death flu thing that was noxious enough that I should have stayed home. Instead, I went to school for a couple of days and coughed like crazy. My biology teacher called me Hack for the rest of my time there.

Today we had a conference and an emergency trip to Storage and through it all I had NyQuil haze. About five minutes ago I had a cold sweat, though my thermometer says I'm normal. (Slightly below normal, actually.)

So I spent part of the evening watching Futurama and the rest trying to avoid coughing up a lung. Perhaps I should take Monday off.

lib-loaner-east

Today contests my ability to be in a solitary place at any given point in time. The conference is wrapping up, and things appear to be going more smoothly today.

However, due to our ongoing Storage weeding project, I had to drop all my conference roadie act and put on my ad hoc wireless guy hat. Now I'm in a dim storage facility with thousands upon thousands of volumes. Some of these can go, some must stay.

There's no free food here like on campus, but it is far more quiet.

Considering how crappy I feel, that's a good thing. I have a cold now and it's about all I can do to type. Bleh.

This giant fighting robot needs a little downtime.

Goldfish do not eat sausages

Today we had a conference at work. Well, by we I mean a small subset of the library had a regional conference. Though for a regional conference we had people from quite a ways away--folks from Atlanta, Green Bay, even a pair from Hawai'i.

However, it could have been planned better. For something that was spreadsheeted and PowerPointed to death, there were a whole lot of simple things that flew under the radar. (On a side note, somebody needs to buy me Edward Tufte's book on PowerPoint, along with all the other stuff he's written. I got an ad for a seminar from him as part of my STC membership but I just couldn't see coming up with $350 for the class...)

So I spent my day running around and dealing with interlibrary loan people and wondering just where in my life I signed on to be an A/V roadie. I set up LCD projectors, ran around etc. etc. etc. My back was killing me this evening and a bit of a bath helped. Still, I wish I'd had a Prince bath bomb from Lush or something. Perhaps we should head down to SF soon to restock...

Spending the evening watching Monty Python and Black Adder, in which I learn that there is no cannibalism in the British Navy. And by none I mean a certain amount.

Weapons of Mass Humiliation

Protestors threw condoms filled with flour at Tony Blair today.

They were evidently a fathers' rights campaign group (who always strike me as guys who feel ripped off in their divorces, judging by the weird guys I used to see espousing same on cable access) and not protesting the British involvement in Iraq. But still, that's gotta sting.

A lifetime ago, Blair once said that if America didn't provide leadership for the world, Britain would. Now he's reduced to being W's lapdog and getting stuff thrown at him. Of course, if that had happened to Thatcher, she'd have ordered them flayed alive.

In other news, it's the Farmer's Market today. Perhaps they will have Oregon strawberries, which are infinitely better than California strawberries.

Currently examining Dreamhost and Typepad. More later.

Analog line only

Last night was a Tuesday night, which is when the Giant Fighting Robot likes to increase his alcohol intake with friends. It was a pretty good night--I revisited the fine world of variables like MonkeyTouch and why you should name directories ZipBiggly. There was also a fine discussion of video games, movies, and the like. Plus more about Jerry Garcia ties. (Fun fact: Walter Cronkite is a big fan of the Dead.)

I also got some of the Stumptown election news while paying my tab. Francesconi and Potter got 37 and 42% of the vote, respectively. Which is amazing once you figure that the former spent almost a million dollars so far and Potter's stealth campaign (with no donation over $25 accepted) spent maybe $75K. So why is that?

Francesconi represents more of current politics-as-usual. Everything you hated about the Katz administration is doubly so under him. Potter looks like a throwback to the days of Bud Clark, which would not be a bad thing.

I'm sad that Busse and Posey didn't break 10%, though together they did. No word on what Jim Spagg got. Happy doodles, dude.

In other news, um, GameFly delivered the GameCube remix of Metal Gear Solid yesterday, so we'll see what the Silicon Knights upgrade looks like.

But can anything break my bolt addiction in Ratchet and Clank 2? MUST HAVE MORE BOLTS.

Probation Period

So after much hemming and hawing, work decided to finally keep me on permanently. However, there's a six-month probationary period. (Much like the first time I was hired as a grant position.) On the other hand, I've been doing this job for over two years. One would think that any bugs would have come out of the woodwork by now.

This is just the system and it's nothing personal, but it certainly feels that way.

In other news, Atrios points to an article in the Village Voice about the Bush administration meeting with a theocratic group to discuss policy on Israel. So that everything meshes with their scenario of the End Times.

Puts everything into perspective, doesn't it? Why not say leave no child behind and then not fund the program? They'll be joining Jebus in heaven any day now.

Heh. I just got an inquiry about a job in New Jersey. That must be the fifth or sixth this year--what part of will not relocate are they missing?

Hey Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig...

The rest of you may find this interesting, too.

The other day we had a symposium on the price of academic journals, which is past the crisis point in this country. Our main speaker was David Schulenberger, who is the provost of the University of Kansas. Some of his talk was taken from a paper on a new system of scholarship.

Basically, while the consumer price index has risen 57% over the last 15 years, the price of health care has risen 121%. The cost of scientific journals? 220%.

Schulenberger has some ideas on how to deal with this--though I cannot see a way out of this beyond massive organization of professors or sweeping anti-trust litigation against Elvesier and other publishers that see nothing wrong with charging the price of a luxury car for a stack of paper with writing on it. The University of Connecticut had their own forum on this as well. I am curious to see what they said about Creative Commons.

End of civilization as we know it...

Much like in San Francisco, and Portland (sorry I can't find a good gallery), now Massachusetts is marrying gay couples.

Other people are linking to John Scalzi's advice for the new couples, but I will also add to them the words of the best man at my wedding:

To infinity, and beyond!

Congratulations, folks.

Donald Rumsfeld Magic Eight Ball

On Morning Sedition, they have retrofitted a Magic Eight Ball with the words and wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld. Its advice for today:

Don't do or say anything you don't want to see on the front page of the Washington Post.

So why have they done everything they've done for the last two years? I mean, I know the Donald is a master of kung fu, but come on.

It's a Monday and I'm back at work. Quiet day of re-imaging machines with new Ghost images. Maybe I'll get a contract today. If not, look for me on the front page of the Washington Post. GIANT ROBOT TRAMPLES PACIFIC NORTHWEST.

You've been warned.

Addendum: Thinking about it, it wasn't Morning Sedition, it was Unfiltered, with Liz Winstead, Chuck D, and Rachel Maddow. Fight the power.

AirAmerica

As seen on Atrios, there's an interesting article in the Star Tribune on the trials and tribulations of Air America.

I listen to Air America at work sometimes, though the Giant Robot's reception on AM isn't very good. Luckily, we have a fairly fast pipe at work. I enjoy a lot of the programs--the O'Franken Factor is pretty good, and Morning Sedition makes me laugh if only for "Recovery Corner," where Marc Moran tries to get his recovering alcoholic friend George W. to admit his mistakes.

The final tagline in the aforementioned article--that radio is not a political machine--is insanely stupid. I mean, once you take out Savage, Hannity, Larson, Snow, Dr. Laura, all of Clear Channel, and Rush, what are you left with? A classical station and a bunch of static.

Next they'll be saying that there's no bias on TV...

Hrm... Where do I meet Jon Lovitz?

Once opon a time, there was a sketch on SNL where Jon Lovitz screamed "Get to know me!" as the secret to success in life. It worked for Don Pardo. Maybe it could work for me.

Anyway, the library job I've been doing for over two years became pretty much permanent after a going-through-the-motions interview. It was more of a review than an interview, but that didn't stop me from buying a new tie or having a celebratory drink of Knob Creek.

Still not king.