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stcynic | September 15, 2005Google has launched a new search engine specifically for blogs. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
stcynic | September 15, 2005A Catholic school in Pennsylvania is trying to raise money for victims of the hurricane in an interesting way. They're playing Hanson's song "MMMBop" on the school's loudspeakers before and after school and in between every class and they won't stop until they've raised $3000. Man, let's hope no one repeats this idea with Celine Dion. I'd donate to a "kill the puppies" fund to stop that crap. Actually, Hanson is bad enough. If I was in a Catholic school, I think I'd rather be molested by a priest than subjected to that song every day.
loom | September 15, 2005A lot of people think of viruses and bacteria in our bodies as nothing more than pests. It's certainly true that a lot of them do an excellent job of making us ill. But some viruses and bacteria merged with our ancestors over the course of billions of years, and if you were to have them removed from your body today, you'd die faster than if you'd gotten a massive dose of Ebola.
In order to breathe, we depend on sausage-shaped blobs in our cells called mitochondria. When I say we, I mean not just humans or animals, but a vast group of species known as eukaryotes, which also includes plants,…
stcynic | September 14, 2005A reader sent me a link to this article about Pat Robertson blaming the hurricane on the fact that Ellen Degeneres was hired to host the Emmy Awards. Now that's not something that would be terribly shocking. Pat Robertson regularly says things that idiotic. But in this case, it's clearly a hoax. First, the 700 Club doesn't air on Sundays, but only Monday-Friday. Second, the byline is "Hollywood", but the 700 Club is taped in Virginia Beach. Third, this is ridiculously over the top even for Robertson. The last line of the article:
"God already allows one awards show to promote the homosexual…
stcynic | September 13, 2005Perhaps I awarded September's Robert O'Brien Trophy too soon, before I became aware of "Dr" Don Boys and this breathtakingly bad piece of anti-evolution agitprop. Even by creationist standards, this is a ridiculous article, chock full of unsourced "quotes" and lots of rhetoric, but virtually no substantive argument. And the very first sentence offers a great opportunity to take a look at "Dr" Boys:
Evolution is pure quackery and purveyors of this foolishness should be branded as quacks. They are phony intellectuals (and a Ph.D. doesn't add credibility to a phony) and venders of ancient…
stcynic | September 13, 2005Well, day one is in the books. It consisted mostly of each member of the committee attempting to feign erudition while reading a script no doubt lovingly prepared by one of their staffers. The opening statements of each of the judiciary committee members has the primary purpose of allowing the Senators to stirke a pose for the various interest groups they represent. The secondary purpose is to test the nominee's ability to sit motionless and pretend to be paying attention for hours on end. In that regard, some are already criticizing Roberts for smiling unduly as one Senator praised his…
stcynic | September 13, 2005Mike Brown has resigned as director of FEMA, and here's what cracks me up about the whole thing. When he was relieved of his duties in New Orleans the other day, DHS director Michael Chertoff said at the press conference that he was being sent back to Washington because other threats exist around the world and Brown was needed in Washington to help prepare for them. He actually said that with a straight face. Did anyone believe him? Was there a single person with an IQ above room temperature who didn't know that Brown would be fired or would quit within a few days of that? It's just another…
stcynic | September 12, 2005The NY Times has a pretty cool resource available on their website. It has the first chapters of hundreds of books that they have reviewed, split into fiction and non-fiction categories. Great way to get a gist of the book and whether you'd want to buy it.
stcynic | September 12, 2005FEMA is of course not the only agency to screw things up in handling the hurricane. Here's a great example of Gov. Blanco screwing up royally:
In emergencies like natural disasters it's normal for states to suspend this requirement and offer temporary reciprocity with the other 49 states, recognizing their licenses as being valid in the affected state. In an emergency, who cares where your doctor's license comes from? Usually this requires a proclamation from the governor stating that there's an emergency and that out-of-state licenses will temporarily be as good as in-state licenses.
In…
stcynic | September 9, 2005Food, clothing and shelter are generally listed as the three necessities of life. Close behind those three, in my view, is music. If I was forced to choose between being blind and deaf, I would choose blindness. That's how difficult it is to imagine living in a world without music. And in the history of American music, no city is more important than New Orleans. America gave the world perhaps its greatest musical gifts - jazz - and New Orleans is its birthplace.
Virtually all of the early greats in jazz came from the Crescent City - Buddy Bolden, Joe "King" Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton. Buddy…
stcynic | September 9, 2005My friend Henry Neufeld, head of the Pacesetter's Bible Institute in Florida, now has his own blog. Anyone interesting in the intersection of science and religion will want to read it. Henry is a Hebrew scholar with a longtime interest in science and just a generally fascinating guy.
stcynic | September 8, 2005If you're like me, you love the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And you're gonna love this clip especially. Follow this link and click on "Meet the F**ckers". It's a hilarious take on the government's response to Katrina that ends with Larry King asking Celine Dion if she has anything to sing to comfort the victims of the hurricane. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go commit ritual disembowlment.
stcynic | September 8, 2005Wow, if this is true there needs to be a major investigation. The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is circulating internal memos from Mobil, Chevron and Texaco that shows that these major oil companies worked to limit refinery capacity in order to drive up the price of gasoline and increase their profits:
The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) today exposed internal oil company memos that show how the industry intentionally reduced domestic refining capacity to drive up profits. The exposure comes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as the oil industry blames…
stcynic | September 8, 2005This story is absolutely unreal to me. While President Bush is telling "Brownie" (FEMA director Mike Brown) that he's "doing a great job", here's what FEMA is actually doing with 1400 firefighters who volunteered to go to the areas ravaged by the hurricanes to help rescue victims:
Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women…
stcynic | September 7, 2005My partner-in-blogging Jason Kuznicki is now Dr. Jason Kuznicki. He successfully defended his dissertation and completed his doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University. He is now demanding to be called His Royal Highness, Master of All He Surveys, but I'm sticking with "Grand Poobah". Seriously, congratulations to Jason for slaying the ABD dragon and scaling the ivory tower. It's an enormous accomplishment that caps off many years of hard work.
The last friend of mine to get his PhD was Wes Elsberry and there are a couple of funny stories that accompany that one. Shortly after he…
stcynic | September 4, 2005I'm still up to my eyeballs in boxes to be unpacked. If you left a comment that requires a reply, I'll get to them at some point. I hadn't even looked at my blog in the last two days until I decided to take a break to post the last message about Rehnquist. By Tuesday, I should be pretty much ready to go.
I finally just got my stove and oven working. The pilot light was out and I couldn't get it lit. My brother came over and managed to get it working. I asked him how he did it and he said, "I have no idea. I just kept messing with it until it lit." The stove, like the rest of the house, is…
stcynic | September 1, 2005Or for the first time, in this case. All the big stuff is moved and my living room is full of boxes, most of them full of books. I went out and bought a couple of bookcases and I think I'm gonna need a couple more. The one thing I don't like about my new house is the size of the kitchen. It doesn't have a separate dining room, so there's a dining room table in a kitchen that was already too small to begin with. For someone who loves to cook, this is a problem. On the good side, it has about a 400 square foot deck, and since I do a lot of my cooking outdoors, this is a good thing. I'm also…
stcynic | August 31, 2005I just bought a new house and today begins the process of moving in to it. If everything goes well, I'll be back online this evening after the cable installers leave. But I won't have phones until Friday morning when they come to set up all my phone lines (4 total, 2 business lines, a personal line and a fax line). All of my phone numbers will have changed, but my email address should remain the same. Tomorrow I move the heavy stuff, followed by days of moving the light stuff (mostly boxes of books) bit by bit. And all of that interrupted on Saturday by an end of the summer season lake party…
stcynic | August 29, 2005Okay, since I upgraded to MT 3.2, I haven't gotten a single comment on this blog and this is highly unusual. Is everyone just lurking? I've had almost a thousand hits so far today and not a word from anyone. It makes me wonder if I've got something screwed up and it's not letting comments through. Either that, or you guys are all trapped under something heavy. If you've tried to leave a comment and it didn't show up, please email me. If that's not the problem and you guys are just unusually quiet...WAKE UP.
Update: Holy for crying out loud. After 3 people emailed me to say they'd left…