The vampire state attacks, II. "...the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in ... "activity for profit." The tax is levied "whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year"..." – and also whether or not they are actually, you know, a business, apparently.

[Via.]

And then I stuff the money in my underpants...? After a miserable week, we finally get a beautiful summer day – breezy, sunny, dry, temperatures in the 70's – even if we still can't drink the tap water, the day is enough to raise our spirits. Time to turn from hoarding bottled water to the old mailbox...

Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 07:39:51 -0700 (PDT)

From: bala inman <inman@hotmail.fr>

To: undisclosed recipients:  ;

Subject: New Day Has Come

----------------------------------------





New Day Has Come

I am an Agric science teacher with University of Cocody and I work as a part time

consultant with an international marketing firm here in Abidjan.

 



Three weeks ago,I went to a seminar at Cape Town South Africa, where I hoped to

present a paper on DOGS OUR GUARDS, PETS AND FRIENDS way forward for

healthy relationship.I was invited by Rotaract International as they were the

organisers of this great occassion and sponsored by The President of the South

Africa,through the Ministry of Agriculture.

 



In attendance were the greatest and biggest names in Africa with respect to

Agriculture. Fortunately,I was able to meet with one of the greatest business

Moguls of all time.We are talking about ALHAJI MAKARFI ALIKO.The president of

Ivoire Group of Farms.The owner of the biggest cattle farm in West Africa and 

The Biggest fish farmer.This is the man they call the food basket of Africa. His

cocoa and palm tree plantations are the biggest and his vegetable oil plants are

located in the 16 West African countries.





Now my former boss supplies this Business magnet an essential vaccine at the

price of US4,900. per carton, and sometimes we supply up to 2000 or 3000 cartons.





Briefly,I am contacting you because my former boss traveled to china and he will

be there for two months.Presently,I intercepted a letter from the Ivoire Group,

requesting two thousand cartons supply of the vaccine.I have called back to the

Ivoire Group and informed them that my boss traveled,he will not be back soon

and since they need the vaccine urgently,that I will introduce them directly to

the Manufacturers of the vaccine from where my boss buy. 





The President of the Ivoire Group invited me to his Presence and I confirmed my

word to him, and he promised me his confidence and to deal only with me if I can

do this. HOWEVER I TOLD HIM THAT THE MANUFACTURERS RECEIVE 70%

ADVANCE PAYMENT BEFORE THEY WILL SELL THE VACCINE





I know where my boss buy this vaccine in Europe. The Price of the vaccine is

US$2000. per carton. I will need you to contact Alhaji Sule Dongo and Inform him

that you are the manufacturer of the vaccine and that you will sell to him at the

price of US$4,400 per carton. You will inform him to make 70% advance payment

as is the Procedure.He will not hesitate to send the money immediately.





If your organization is interested to be my partners in this transaction, please

contact me immediately so that we can discuss on how to execute this lucrative

deal.





Truly yours,

Dr.  Bala Inman

Even there, things are murky. Mr. Bala's nameless "former boss" suddenly makes an appearance, and then the "President of the Ivoire Group" (Mr. Aliko? not sure), and then some other guy named "Alhaji Sule Dongo". And what is the point of all these new characters? It is still unclear, even as the crux of the biscuit appears: "I will need you to contact Alhaji Sule Dongo and Inform him that you are the manufacturer of the vaccine." But... I'm not the manufacturer of the vaccine, and I'm not in Europe, where this overly-complex story has the vaccine coming from. (And why is this coming from a French free mail service?)

Even more off-key, this scam is an invitation to a degree of fraud that is jarringly at odds with the usual 419, which specializes in the illusion of partnering in victimless crime (if you don't take the money, it will just ... go to waste!). In this case, I'm supposed to ... misrepresent myself to "one of the greatest business Moguls of all time" and assume that this somehow ends well for me? I don't think so.

The vampire state attacks. This small business horror story is so gob-smacking that — that I am speechless, reduced to a sputtering silence, or at least its Internet equivalent. I can do no more than reproduce and highlight some of the more astonishing passages.

Moms come into New to You Kids in Greenfield [Wisconsin] every week to sell their babies' outgrown rompers to the small resale shop. But the business says it will have to close if it has to comply with a new city ordinance requiring it to take each mom's picture and send that, along with detailed descriptions of the items she sells, to a police database every day.

[...]

[Half-Price Books]... also is thinking about filing a lawsuit against Greenfield on First Amendment grounds, because the new ordinance, which takes effect next summer, will require the bookstore to send police a daily list of customers who sell books to them, with identification and titles sold.[...]

But Greenfield Police Detective Chuck Fletcher has news for resale operators who think they can escape the reporting requirements by moving to another town: There soon may to no place to run, no place to hide.

"You may be able to jump over to Greendale or West Allis, but guess what," said Fletcher, noting that with more cities adopting stricter ordinances, retailers may have trouble finding a place without restrictions.

Fletcher is the unofficial state expert and promoter of a new municipal code that requires resale stores to send information into a statewide police database.

[...]

The new code being adopted by cities around the state is based on a state law that already requires pawn shops and businesses that buy metals and jewelry to take and keep information on sellers and items. The code expands the requirements by including businesses that haven't needed to report transactions in the past and by mandating that the businesses install software from the Northeastern Wisconsin Property Reporting System and input seller identification and detailed merchandise descriptions each day. Businesses must photograph sellers and items, and they must keep the items for a set period of time - 10 to 30 days in most cities that have adopted the ordinances - before reselling them.

The reporting system was developed a few years ago by the Green Bay Police Department, which maintains the database. Use of the system is free to municipalities, but some, including Greenfield and Wausau, are imposing transaction fees on resale stores to offset policing costs.

Greenfield will require retailers to pay 50 cents for each purchase they make up to $10, a dollar for every transaction from $10 to $100, plus an extra 1% of the transaction amount for sales over $100. Wausau, which enacted its ordinance in July, is charging a flat $1.50 fee per transaction. The Wausau ordinance has no exclusions for any resale businesses and includes consignment transactions.

At New to You Kids, owner Reinhardt estimates the fees will amount to $10,000 per year.

"But the fees are the tip of the iceberg," he said. The shop already keeps information on the identity of sellers, but the new ordinance will require his store to do merchandise documentation that it doesn't now do. He will need to hire two people to type product descriptions of 140,000 items per year - many of them carrying prices below $1 - into the police database. The wages for those jobs will cost him $40,000, and the store doesn't bring in enough money to offset that, Reinhardt said.

...

Fletcher, the Greenfield detective, sees no reason for exemptions and is unmoved by the pleas of business operators who say the ordinance places an unfair burden on them.

"I'm pretty firm on this," Fletcher said. "If you take anything secondhand, you need to know the integrity of your customer. They say, '99% of my customers are honest.' But what about the other 1%?"

Do citizens of the state of Wisconsin realize that they have a self-appointed Lord High Executioner of Small Businesses? Mr. Fletcher seems to have a weird hostility to businesses that take second-hand merchandise, and waaay to much enjoyment at the thought of all ... that ... power.

Fletcher and people like him will probably be protected and encouraged, though, as long as their activities serve the real goal, which is to help the increasingly desperate and cornered municipalities fasten, vampire-like, on to any source of additional money. This reality is briefly touched on:

The fees associated with the Greenfield ordinance, though, appear to be a way for the municipality to raise money at a time when local governments are financially stressed.

[...]

Greenfield Mayor Michael Neitzke said aldermen may be inclined to consider an exemption for books and clothing before the ordinance takes effect. ... "The real problem is the gold businesses," Neitzke said. "We need to be reasonable and we need to balance constitutional rights and the need to stay in business in a tough economy."

Constitution!? That silly old thing?

Every so often, Robert Fisk has to remind us that he's still the Internet's number-one wanker.

My fascinating navel, pt. 2. For the first time in five years, we've (well, I've) made changes to the blogroll. It seemed fitting, given some of the events of the recent past, and besides the existing blogroll had become more and more useless, with many dead links, or links that redirected you to other links, which in turn redirected you to... etc. And besides, in the intervening years there had come into our consciousness yet other blogs, ones which M. and I read frequently, that were not listed at all.

So a cull and revamping has been effected. Some blogs we used to link to have vanished completely, leaving just a ghostly 404 behind. Some have died and become zombies, taken over by domain squatters. Some have become frozen in time, untouched by human hands since, say, 2007. Others just slowly   sputtered   out,    posts    becoming      rarer  and     rarer,        until          eventually....
<silence>

Such blogs, yes, even those from the legendary days of the Golden Age of Blogging, have at long last been retired from the roll. (Of special note here is 2Blowhards, which just last week decided to pack it in for good.)

Many other bloggers on our roll have changed venue in the past 5 years; for a while I thought it was amusing having to track Andrea Harris orMegan McArdle or Mindles H. Dreck down via myriad intervening links, but enough is enough, and now the blogroll links are actually up-to-date.

Alan Sullivan's blog passed into the shadows along with the blogger; but such was the cohesion among his commentariat that they created a new group blog in his honor. So far, it looks interesting.

Mark your calendars. August 21st, 2017.That's right, finally a total solar eclipse that us 'Murrikuns won't have to go to Patagonia or Easter Island to observe. This helpful map allows you to drill in and find the area of totality most conveniently located for you.

[Via.]

Yes, it's a nice little town, but ninth best? In the whole country? Methinks the CNN Money people had their rose tinted sunglasses on when they came through town. Or maybe they just threw darts at a map, given some of their other choices.

I mean, many things about our town are very nice. It's small enough that you can easily bike, or walk, or take the bus to such attractions and shops as we have; it's reasonably attractive; the U. gives it a bit of polish and culture; the people here are generally very honest and very friendly. The cost of living is quite low, relative to most of the rest of the country. You want sweet corn and pork chops, well, brother, this is the place.

But still – it's flat. In the summer it gets hot and humid, in the winter it can get mind-numbingly cold. Of the "188 restaurants", probably 100 are cheap pizza joints, 80 are sports bars, and all of them play their music too damned loud. We are in the largest National Park-free zone in the lower 48. The retail experience does not "bustle"; in fact, as previously noted, it is rather sad and depressed. (That post was from 2006, and to date the vaunted mall renovations have not occurred.) Sometimes, I find myself thinking that there's nothing wrong with the town that wouldn't be cured by picking it up, lock, stock, and outlying farmland, and dropping it in the Willamette Valley somewhere, preferably not too close to Eugene. (Of course, then you'd just end up layering all of Oregon's pathologies on it... this thought experiment may require some redesign.)

Coincidentally, just today I learned that finally – finally – we are getting a Trader Joe's within driving distance. It's still about 50 miles away, but at least that beats filling up the trunk on yearly visits to the ancestral Cascadian stomping grounds.

Unclear on the concept: Somebody at the San Francisco Chronicle doesn't know what the word "glut" means. Perhaps they accidentally looked at the antonyms section of their thesaurus (a.k.a. Big Book of Hard Words, Journalist's Edition):

Berkeley activist has fix for job glut: cut the work week

Crossing the bar. Alan Sullivan died earlier today, after a long battle with lymphoma.*
Sullivan's blog, down there on the blogroll, was, for me, a fine example of the promise of blogging, fulfilled – a forum for an intelligent, entertaining amateur (in the true sense of the word) to share his deep interest and knowledge, unfiltered, with anyone who cared to listen. His blog posts were what I hoped mine would be like, if mine were more frequent, and more interesting. It is no exaggeration to say that Fresh Bilge was usually the first blog I would check in the morning.

He had a seasoned mariner's insight into weather systems, particularly tropical storms, which is how I first became aware of his blog. I stuck around for the fine and detailed coverage of volcanoes, the sailing and travel reminiscences, the poetry, and even the politics and religion, though those were interests less shared.

And of course there was his illness, which he recorded unflinchingly, to the end. Even when deathly ill, he could write more, and better, than I could ever hope to.

R. I. P., Mr. Sullivan.

...if you can keep it. I intended to post this yesterday, but was distracted.

A few days ago, Jesse the café proprietor posted an extended excerpt of Lincoln's 1838 Lyceum address. The thoughts expressed are especially appropriate for the 4th of July:

At the close of [the American revolution], nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or brother, a living history was to be found in every family– a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related – a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.–

But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foeman could never do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling of its walls. They are gone.–They were a forest of giant oaks; but the all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage; unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more.

They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason. Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.--

Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws: and – that we improved to the last; that we remained free to the last; that we revered his name to the last; that, during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place; shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington.

Jesse is deeply pessimistic on this topic, as his comments make clear. I am less so, but not out of any greater well of knowledge – just my brainless happy! happy! happy! optimism coming to the fore again, I guess. Even so, Lincoln clearly saw the danger that the loss of the past represented to the Republic, less than sixty years after its founding; how much greater the danger is now, and how much less people seem to know or care.

We get e-mail. Not much, true, but some. The following was in my Inbox recently:

Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:16:59 -0400
From: Barbara O'Brien 
To: david@moirabreen.com
Subject: blog question
Parts/Attachments:
   1   OK    ~23 lines  Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
   2 Shown   ~68 lines  Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
----------------------------------------
 
Dear David,
  
My name is Barbara O?Brien and my blogging at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, AlterNet, and
elsewhere on the progressive political and health blogophere has earned me the notoriety of being
a panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America
Conference in Washington, DC.
 
I?m contacting you because I found your blog in a political and health care site search and want to
tell you about my newest blogging platform ?the public concern of health care, especially in light
of the new bill.
 
To increase awareness on these important issues, my goal is to provide a guest posting for you
that can be placed?or even just simply get a link.  I hope to hear from you soon.  
 
Namaste,
 
Barbara O?Brien
 
barbaraobrien@maacenter.org

Anyway, there's our allegedly 'political' orientation popping up again. Ms. O'Brien's name and that of her blog sounded vaguely familiar, so I popped over for a look-see; much angry railling at wingnuts! Hmmm, I thought to myself, Alien Corn isn't really on board with her program; I'm afraid there's not much we can do for each other here. Although, it's awfully decent and trusting of her to grant us the opportunity to provide a post for her blog...

"That's not what it says", M. pointed out. "She wants us to put her posting on our blog."

Ahh. Well, that's rather cheeky, what? Just randomly asking other people to post your stuff? Even more so, then, I'm afraid we must decline – and anyway, there's her requested link up there. "I hope to hear from you soon." Hmmm, so is an RSVP in order? Think think think... nah, it would just clutter up the Intertubes some more.

I'm considering outsourcing the blog: maybe the quality will improve. The posting frequency, at least... this past weekend, Instapundit and others linked to a perceptive article on the training of Ph.D. scientists in the U.S. – I can tell it is perceptive because it agrees with me on the subject – surprise, surprise, U.S. graduate schools are churing out far more Ph.D.'s than academia can support, and more than U.S. industry is willing to pay for – and U.S. students, not being stupid, are becoming less likely to spend their prime years slaving away in grad school bondage in return for an ever less likely decent job at the other end. And then be told by some tech industry lobbyist that you don't exist. "We looked for American workers, honest! But they're all too stupid and lazy! Can we have another 100,000 H-1B visas now?"*

It's summertime, and that means...

geology deathmarch!!

Yaquina Head, Oregon. A whole beach made of black basalt cobblestones.

(And the BLM wanted seven bucks to let us go there. Who do they think they are, the National Freaking Park Service?)

Science, industry, history, mystery. Our lightning Chicago museum tour ended at the Museum of Science and Industry. This museum seems to have been the model for other museums of Science! and Industry! around the country, and I suppose it is not fair to blame the original for the shallow, flashy, spectacle-prone sins of its wannabe imitators. Because the original really does have some nifty stuff inside; I mentioned the U-boat some time ago, and also fitting on this 66th anniversary of D-Day is that they have one of only two extant Stuka dive bombers on display:

And a Spitfire:

(The model-airplane-building adolescent trapped within — help! I'm trapped in the body of a balding middle-aged man! — just ate that stuff up.)

One thing that really struck me about the Museum – it is huge. We entered from the parking garage, descending steps into a vast underground lobby / ticket desk that doubles as exhibit space for several trains. From the lobby, we ascended back into the museum proper and wandered through several of its wings, following a mazelike set of passages to eventually end up in the presence of the Apollo 8 command module, and through another mazelike set of passages to end up at the bow of the U-505.

What the hell? I mean, seriously. What... what the hell? Are they supposed to be Kang and Kodos' younger siblings or something?

Prometheus blogged. Over the weekend, I happened upon this Althouse post, and read the attached comments section with ever-growing disappointment – not just that the subject at hand, important and interesting as it is, had engendered a conversation that quickly devolved into little more than a bunch of pseudonymous strangers slinging insults at each other – but that the insults were so poor, so lacking in pizzazz, in punch.

The hollowness and toothlessness of that exchange was reinforced by Monday's bus reading, Edith Hamilton's translation of Prometheus Bound. Down there in the extended section, Prometheus, the Chorus, and Hermes duke it out, old-school:

At play in the Field. It occurs to me that I have done a spectacularly bad job of following through with blogposts concerning our little travels, often threatened, yet rarely delivered. Pictures and sparkling commentary on Effigy Mounds National Monument? A mere velleity. That museum trip to Chicago? Just kinda dribbled away, there, lost in the fog of blognui and wwweltschmertz.

Well, no more! I've resolved to get back in the saddle (again) and crank out them posts (again) and here comes Sue the Tyrannosaur to kick my ass back into action.

This is the real Sue, not some mere copy, occupying pride of place in the Field's great lobby. Well, almost the real Sue – the skeleton is the real deal, but Sue's head, Jeremy Bentham- like, is kept separately from her body, because such a massive block of stone simply weighed too much for the armatures to support.It is displayed separately on a second-floor balcony.

I'd never been to the Field Museum before, but I certainly knew it by reputation as arguably one of the three best natural history museums in America, along with the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History. Certainly in terms of research activities, rather than just displaying items crammed in dusty dark hallways, the Field is probably second to none. Back in my previous life as a biologist, I knew a number of very sharp people who ended up working for the Field Museum.

However, the afternoon we spent at the Field wasn't taken up with its animal collections, past or present. (In fact, given the prominence of Sue in the main hall, I was surprised at how little fossil material seemed to be on display. Maybe we were just in the wrong part of the museum.) Rather, we turned our attention to the human exhibits, especially the Egyptian and Amerindian collections.

Because of the low lighting conditions needed for preservation, getting pictures was tricky, and there were a lot of hold-breath-and -stand-very-still shots, most of which were disappointments. Still, some of them came out... well, passably.

At left is a small statue, about a foot tall, that the Museum itself says is one of its best pieces of Egyptian art (it's kept in a case along with four other sculptures, and the caption says, "These are the museum's five finest pieces of Egyptian art", or words to that effect.) It's Osiris, while he was still in one piece. Osiris is a fashionably dressed god-on-the-go sporting his trademark crook and flail, no-nonsense atef crown (with cobra accessory) and ... what look kind of like horns sticking out of the sides of his head. The ram was apparently associated with Osiris, and I've seen a few paintings showing him with ram's horns. Or maybe they're part of the crown – it's hard to tell.

On the right is one of those pictures that I wish had come out better, but the very low light and my unsteady hands conspired against it. I have long been fascinated by the Faiyum funerary portraits as some of the oldest known, fairly* realistic images of humans. The Field Museum has one, but to be honest it's not a very good one, and it's not in good shape either. To prevent further deterioration, it's kept in very low light, which called for a degree of steadiness these old palsied hands can't manage anymore. (*There's some evidence, according to Wikipedia, that the portraits are much more 'stock' than I thought – the painters may have had a certain assortment of standard faces, noses, eyes, facial hair, etc, and just combined as necessary, like someone assembling a police I.D.)

Coming out of the Egyptian exhibits, we wandered past the Man-eaters of Tsavo and Bushman the gorilla, ending up in the Northwest coast exhibits.

Moira had once mentioned to me how much of an effect the totem pole room had on her as a child – I can attest that it is still ominous and creepy, but in a good way.

Some of the pole figures looked almost polynesian in design, but all are from the Northwest coast. Trolling through Wikipedia, I learn that poles are erected for a variety of reasons: as mortuary structures, to commemorate people or events, or display clan lineages. There are also, apparently, "shame poles": "Poles used for public ridicule are usually called "shame poles", and were erected to shame individuals or groups for unpaid debts."

To finish, here is a Moche vessel, from what is now Peru – this piece is notable for both the realism and the unusual good humor of the figure portrayed.

Suburbia, red in tooth and claw. After the snowy, very snowy, winter, spring has sprung and is in full swing; in fact, we went from 2+ feet of snow on the ground to mild, sunny temperatures so fast that even our young red oak, which last year held tightly onto its leaf buds until the 3rd week of May, has started spreading its fragile brownish-green leaves. The animal kingdom has responded as well, and we have nesting robins and mourning doves all around, and fox squirrels in abundance, and bunnies. Bunnies everywhere; they survived the winter by severely damaging many bushes and fruit trees in the neighborhood, scraping off so much bark in their desperation that many a tree was girdled. The bushes fared a little better, being better adapted by their growth form for such treatment; much of the shrubbery now sports a two-tiered look, with a thin scrim of green leaves at the tips of a few still-living branches, while a thicker belt of green sprouts from beneath the zone where the voracious bunny bastards did their damage.

Rabbits being rabbits, we are starting to see tiny little bunnies now; I startled two from their hiding places while mowing the lawn last week, and yesterday found some more, ah, disturbing evidence of their presence. The Spawn and I were looking over the mass of weeds that is the front garden preparatory to making a plan to think about how we might potentially remodel it, when I noticed something out of place. I didn't recognize it immediately, I just knew it wasn't something I expected to see amid the sprouting greenery, rocks, and mulch. It took a few seconds to resolve, and then I recognized it; the back half of an infant rabbit, plus a few miscellaneous internal organs. Once I registered the image, I noticed that there were two other such unfortunates, in the same state, scattered around the garden. And also the torn-up remnants of a rabbit nest, with the mother's fur scattered in clumps among the weeds.

What with the biological background and all, the Spawn and I examined the scene for a few minutes. We speculated on the likely predator for such an action – domestic cat, or fox? We've seen both nearby, but I'd suspect cat, just because they are more abundant. Both species, if presented with abundant prey, will sometimes kill far more than they will eat.

Oddly enough, the exact same thing happened last year. If anything, last year's incident was even more creepy, because we exited our garage one fine Spring morning, and found four headless baby rabbits, neatly lined up on our driveway. It was as though we had stepped into some sort of vicious lapine gang warfare, and somebody was sending a message to somebody else's den – but again, presumably, it was a local predator, a very obsessive-compulsive one. (This year wasn't nearly so neat.)

So we sort of gave up on the gardening plans, at least for now. I mean, it's a rabbit graveyard, right? There must be some kind of taboo associated with disturbing it.

Easter 2010.

And that's what I get for being a card-carrying Democrat. 99.99% of the time, if the phone rings during the evening hours, it's somebody looking for money. What with our wanderings over the past 20 years, you'd think we would be able to shake our various almae matres' alumni groups by now, but they still call, alongside various random charity groups and benevolent associations. Moira is much better at dealing with such people – a polite but firm "No", followed quickly by a firmer "Goodbye" – but I, being the softie that I am, often end up getting dragged into lengthy phone conversations that end up wasting everybody's time.

To prevent such unhappiness, Moira usually answers the phone at the Casa. This evening, a call came in that sounded like it might have been some co-worker, so M. handed the phone off to me right away. Within about 5 seconds, I realized it wasn't a co-worker, and was somebody who was going to hit us up for money... after another 15 seconds or so (I waited patiently while the guy on the other end of the line slowly read his script) it developed that he was calling to raise money for the Iowa Democratic Party. Culver... Harkin... evil Republicans...

As he slowly worked his way towards the end of his spiel, I thought about my response. The only thing that was obviously out, of course, was "Yes! Of course I'll give you money!" I'd kind of decided to let him down easy (being Mr. Softie and all), when he came to his last words, which were, "Can I put you down for one hundred dollars?"

One hundred dollars? Like you people aren't blowing enough of our money already? I told him I was disgusted with the Democratic Party and politics in general, and wasn't sending money to anybody. And in return for the suggested donation – One hundred dollars? – I hung up on him in mid-sentence. Felt pretty good... I could start to like this hanging-up-on-people stuff. Bring 'em on!

First they came for the brownies, and I did not speak up because I was not a homemade baked good...

but but but it's for the children!!

[Via Althouse, which means everybody has seen this already.]

Adlerian odds and ends. Oh, yes, right, the blog! I'll get right on it. In a second... just give me a minute here...

Finishing off our tour through the bowels of the Adler Planetarium, I'll mention a few things in passing that I can't really say much about.

For instance, I don't know what this is, and the good folks at the Adler don't either.

It's round and brass and covered with Arabic, but beyond that, no one seems to know what it was meant for, even though they appear to know the name of its maker. It's not even very old (1864?) but even in that fairly short span of time, the knowledge of whatever this was meant to be used for apparently has been lost.

The Adler has a wide representation of instruments made throughout the Islamic world, which for the most part differ little in their fundamental technology from the instruments of Europe – most of the differences appear to be matters of style.

The Adler wants us to be very clear about how good dhimmis had it under the Caliphate:

Prospered, got that? All right then.

I'm afraid I have nothing, intelligent or otherwise, to say about either of these objects, other than "Hey! Look at these cool objects!" The explanatory material at the Adler was sometimes a bit on the sparse side, and I compounded the problem by not having any way to take notes.

Finally, here is a copy of Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, in which he states a number of things that later got him into hot water, printed as a miniature book. I'm not sure what the rationale behind the tiny book was – was it a way to keep a banned book easily hidden from prying eyes? Or was it just a technical feat for the printer?

"For pleasant is this flesh... Is there any better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than knocking back a bit of bubbly^[1] and listening to a cat play a theremin?*

Or, re-reading Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, as I am wont to do on a Sunday afternoon with the snow piling up, its muffled voice whispering, "oh, you have a lot of shoveling to do before sunrise tomorrow..." Is there some sort of connection here between the cat and Browning? Eh, you tell me.

*(Another useful video on basic theremin technique here.)

^[1]This one. (--DCF.)

Next up: Fortran on funiculars. Time for some obscure computer geek humor. May I present:

HTTP://WWW.COBOLONCOGS.ORG/

Got yer derogatory feminine right here, buddy... I wandered across this post at Language Log, discussing the problem of nouns that describe occupations, roles, and titles – what is this burning problem, you ask? Well, in English there isn't much of one, because there are relatively few such nouns that are gender-specific (remember, I said "relatively few"). And English, in typical neologistic fashion, cranks out new sex-neutral nouns as needed (e.g., 'chairperson' or 'chair'). And English being the creole that it is, the nouns themselves have no gender in the linguistic sense.^[1]

Contrast this with the mess the Romance languages have gotten themselves into:

In languages like Italian and Spanish, in contrast, nearly all such words are specified for grammatical gender, and their grammatical gender is usually interpreted sexually. Furthermore, the option to create gender-neutral replacements is linguistically unavailable — the only practical alternatives are to use one gender (usually masculine) as the default for both sexes, or to coin a new word for the marked sexual category (as in English chairwoman or househusband). [...] Both options seem to make a lot of people unhappy. The article says that "In Italian, most women prefer the masculine titles, because the feminine version (when it exists) is considered ludicrous, even derogatory".

By remarkable coincidence, I ran across this example of the derogatory feminine just a few days ago:

[Sesostris] marched through Asia, conquering every nation that he encountered. Now, for those he encountered who struggled bravely and fiercely for their freedom, he set up pillars in their lands with inscriptions declaring his name, his native land, and how he had subdued them with his might. And for those whose cities he took easily and without a fight, he inscribed the same words on the pillars as he did for the courageous peoples, but added an image of female genitals, wishing to publicize their impotence.^[2][3]

^[1]Moira, who knows languages far better than I, points out that I'm just talking out my ass here. I don't really know why English lacks gendered nouns.^[1a]
[1a]Moira here: No, I did not say that David was inarguably talking out of his ass here. For all I know, the "creolization" process in the development of modern English did indeed strip it of its genders. But his articulate ass does come into the picture in that, when questioned on this interesting point of dis-gendering creoles, he admitted that he had no idea where he acquired this notion, or why it should be so. So we may now proceed to quibble about whether it is correct to describe a statement as having been derived from one's ass, if it is actually true but indefensible by the owner of said ass at the time of the accusation. But he is inarguably talking out of his ass about my "knowing languages". Perhaps we could both stop talking out of our asses about this and look up/ask somebody who talks out of the proper orifice on this subject. Like the guy at the linked blog, for example.
^[2]Herodotus, The Histories, Book 2, Section 102. Translated by Andrea Purvis. (The bit quoted differs slightly from the more common Macaulay translation.)
^[3]The editors add at this point, "None of this material about Sesostris is true..."

Really frosting my juniper. I think I wrote something about not harping on endlessly about the weather, but I thought this photo of the juniper in the back yard:

was pretty cool. It's a color image,but the tree is very, very coated with frost. A day or two later, it – and everything else within a hundred miles – became coated with about a third of an inch of ice. But that wasn't as photogenic.

Now, it's just raining.

Listen (snark of the day). Time Magazine appears to have acquired a time machine, but instead of the useful, H.G. Wells kind of of time machine, that allows you to go back to time t - x and replay events as they would have occurred to t - (x + y), it is instead a poor-quality or defective time machine that apparently plays time backwards.

At least, that is my explanation for this tangled passage, concerning the current (2010, remember) elections in Ukraine:

Particularly [Viktor] Yushchenko. Once seen as the Barack Obama of his day, with approval ratings topping 70% in February 2005, the sitting President is now badly trailing...

So Time is telling me that Yushchenko was seen as the "Barack Obama of his day"? And that Yushchenko was seen in this light in 2005? I would think that practically nobody outside of Illinois and the Democratic Party knew who B. O. was back then, so did the Ukranian population all live through the period 2005 – 2008 in reverse, thus enabling them to transfer the universally-acknowledged charismatic wonderfulness of the mighty O. onto Yushchenko? It seems unlikely that the population of a whole country would use such a time machine, especially one that operated in such a disorienting manner; maybe its use was reserved for Time Magazine staff, and they personally became unstuck in time so that they could relive the 2008 presidential campaign, and then return to 2005 to be able to say to each other, "Hey! This guy's just like Barack Obama!" 'Cause I don't recall anyone else saying anything like that.

Dear History Channel: On rare occasions, we still find ourselves watching a complete program or two on cable television. Last Sunday night was one such occasion. Somehow, we ended up on your channel, watching a program called "Apocalypse Island", a 2-hour (!) frothy mass of lies wrapped around a core of nothing. It purported to be the story of an "explorer" who, exploring away on a remote island!!, found tantalizing evidence of ... a Mayan artifact!!!

I'll give away the ending: there is no "artifact". Suffice it to say that the program was utter bilge from start to finish. It would take far more time that it would be worth to enumerate all, or most, or even some of the shameless whopping lies told, or implied, in "Apocalypse Island". During commercial breaks, you interrupted the parade of cranks spouting garbled bits of Mayan history to peddle, over and over again, additional programs of sensationalistic mindless crap (UFO Hunters! Ax Men! Nostradamus!). There was a time when your channel showed programs about history – do you remember that? Or are all your programmers and executives drug-addled twentysomethings? Why even call it the "History Channel" anymore, for God's sake?

But I must give your channel credit. I have made idle threats in the past to disconnect our cable television because the the utter craptacularity of what was available. Spurred on by "Apocalypse Island", however, we have taken action; we are willing to pay money to have garbage taken away from the house, but we are not willing to pay money to have garbage pumped into the house. As of today, we have cut you (and all the rest of the cable TV freakshow) off. Basta!

UPDATE: The face behind the evil."You have to recognize what audiences are consuming. At its heart, we're still telling historical stories...We're just telling them in a more innovative way." The next "innovation": docudrama as history.

Unmentionables. A few posts ago, Moira noted the hand-wringing pantywaistedness of a publisher of classic books who felt compelled to preface every title with a parental advisory, for the children! But now I've got an example that tops hers for silliness and degree of bowdlerization.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The N-word of the Narcissus.

...the introduction of "n-word" throughout the text, to remove this offence to modern sensibilities.

(Tip o' the chapeau to Messrs. Hill and Campion. For the technologically up-to-date, there is also a Kindle version of the story, which preserves Conrad's original text, but just can't quite bring itself to write out the title in full.)

UPDATE (27Dec09): Questions as to the sincerity of this effort have been raised (see Comments). It's possible that this is the work of a conservaMoby, but I dunno. If it's a joke, it's a very elaborate one, involving a real publishing house and, apparently, real books. According to the infallible Wikipedia, the presence of ... that word! has, in fact, been considered an obstruction to the work being read and taught:

In fact, were it not for the book's title, it undoubtedly would be read more often than it is currently.

— cite from some guy

The focus... is the translation and/or publication of works of scholarship expressive of historic Western Christendom.

Christmas treats. This is the one time of year when even curmudgeons like ourselves are wont to veer unpredictably into short random bursts of kindness. For instance, remember my threat sometime back to get all pedantic on the readership's collective ass regarding armillary spheres? Well, as it turns out, I really can't think of anything to say about them at all. So you're spared! Except for this picture.

Similarly, the Ranting Spawn took it upon herself to spearhead the production of this year's batch of Christmas cookies, which are an old Fleck family tradition, requiring the skilled use of vintage Mirro aluminum cookie-forming tools handed down generation after generation. They are, in my slightly biased opinion, the best cookies ever made in the history of the world. True, I guess this doesn't really benefit anyone outside Casa Fleck y Breen, but still, it does increase the sum total of happiness in the world, and that ought to count for something, correct?

As does the fact that a "local" (within the same state) wine shop had a sale going on, so M. and I picked up a treat for ourselves: a bottle of Heidsieck Monopole for Christmas Eve. Mmmmmm.

And finally, Moira received an e-mail spam from Tom Harkin trumpeting his role in bringing about the brave new world of American health care, and in the spirit of the season, she decided not send a reply ripping him a new one. Not today, anyway.