...
UPDATE. Moira claims that she will write at least one post about the Badlands Experience, but it has not manifested itself as of yet. If nothing is forthcoming soon, I'll just have to do it myself, I guess.
It just seems like a busy time, and the blog gets backburnered. I like to put a little bit of thought into these posts, you know? I don't just want to slap up a bunch of Look at my cat picturz LOLOLOL-type posts; God knows there's already plenty of that stuff floating around the Internet.
...or I could throw up some recipe-posts. We had a darned tasty dinner tonight, thrown together out of the back yard's tomatoes (a Better Boy, two Jetstars, and a Mr. Stripey) and some various herbs that have naturalized in the yard and become weed plants. We cubed the tomatoes, sliced and grilled a yellow sweet pepper, ... ahhhh, screw it.
I'll try again tomorrow.
Sometimes the trails cross roads, and of course at those crossings are all the usual accoutrements of pedestrian-cyclist-car interaction; this afternoon I coasted up to the crossing signal at one of the busier streets I have to cross when I am Cycling Commuter Guy, and pressed the button to cross, waiting for the green light and the little white crossing man to appear. After a few seconds letting the sweat dribble down my scalp, the little man appeared, and I began my crossing of the four lanes, three of which passed without incident.
In the fourth was a dark blue sedan, which had slowed pursuant to making a right turn. The driver's side window was up, and reflections prevented me from seeing the driver; and apparently she didn't see me either, because as I crossed from the third lane to the fourth, it dawned on me that the car wasn't stopping. Those cliches about time slowing down, events inevitable yet drawn out? All true, apparently; I started to steer left, away from the oncoming vehicle, but the voice inside my head said, "You're going to be hit by a car." Perfectly matter-of-fact, you understand.
I think the left front corner of the car hit my front wheel, which then caused me to fall against the hood of the car, whereupon I did one of those Rockford Files-type rolls up the hood until I reached the windshield, when I fell off onto my knees to the left of the car.
The internal voice said, OK, quick inventory. Arms 2, legs 2, fingers 10, feet 2, torso seems intact, vision ok, head seems ok. Then the bike; down, but not obviously damaged. By this time, the woman driving the car had emerged, fluttering about Oh my God are you OK? I didn't see you at all etc. Interestingly enough, I felt fine; my right knee a bit scraped up, but other than that, I was positively jovial, and I calmed the woman down. I thought the car had hit the rear wheel, and so I carried the bike to the curb and spent several minutes fussing with the derailleurs while the woman said – a bunch of stuff, I don't really remember.
Eventually, she gave me her name and number – I probably wouldn't have thought to ask – and I took off, and only then noticed that the front wheel was now bent, though still somewhat rideable. There seemed to be a bit more – resistance – as well. Well, nothing for it but to carry on and cycle the remaining 2.5 miles to home.
Tomorrow, I'll drive the bike to the bike shop, and get the damages assessed; other than a skinned right knee, and a whopping bump on my left shin, I seem to be ok – or at least nothing that a bit of feminine attention and a few glasses of Mumm Napa Blanc de Noir can't help.
this is going to sound very offensive to some people. Also, i have no evidence to back it up.
I think, maybe, that obese people tend to be less intelligent than thin people, on average, which would explain them making less money. They certainly seem to not be smart enough to stop eating.
obese people tend to be less intelligent than thin people
This would seem to go against the stereotype of the overweight computer geek.
Stoneymonster,
I don't buy that stereotype.
The computer geeks I know are all thin.
Plus, what about the stereotype of the skinny nerd in glasses?
My anecdotes are better than your anecdotes. I went to engineering school with many brilliant people, overweight and thin.
I went to community college with many stupid people, mostly overweight.
*Yes, I am one of those insufferable pedants who insist on reminding people that 'data' is a plural noun.
Dangerous Java flaw threatens virtually everythingVia.
“It’s one of those cases where the glass wasn’t half-full or half-empty, it was the wrong size,” Kelley said.Or maybe it was the wrong color. Or it was a pickle jar, not a glass. Or maybe it was an old shoe, missing its lace and lying on its side.
Via The Corner, via Instapundit, an NYT article about today's new, hip, young librarians:
Michelle Campbell, 26, a librarian in Washington, said that librarianship is a haven for left-wing social engagement, which is particularly appealing to the young librarians she knows. “Especially those of us who graduated around the same time as the Patriot Act,” Ms. Campbell said. “We see what happens when information is restricted.”
Uh-huh. Anyway, I noticed this tidbit in today's unasked-for-newspaper (still arriving daily):
Monday
Film about Sept. 11 attacks featured
The film, "Loose Change 2nd Edition," will be shown at 7 p.m. Monday, July 9, in Ames Public Library's Farwell T. Brown Auditorium. The event is free.
Hmmmm, could a common thread be emerging? It wouldn't be the first time the local public library got itself involved in showing dodgy films.
UPDATE: One of the things I learned from grad. school: If you collect some data, you will begin to see all sorts of beautiful correlations and patterns emerge; if you collect more data, most of your beautiful patterns will fall apart.* Doing some additional poking around the Library's calendar, I found:
Event:
Reel Connections: Confronting the New World Order, "Premeditated Merger"
Time: 07:00 PM
Description: In this film, past President and CEO of the John Birch Society Charles R. Armour discusses U.S.-USSR relations.
Location: Ames Public LibrarySo, fully consonant with Ms. Campbell's information-wants-to-be-free mantra, the Library apparently makes it film projectors available to any kook who wanders in, not just those of a particular stripe, and inference of partisan leanings would be unwarranted. So apologies are in order, to the library, at least, and the essence of my post lies in ruins upon the floor. Maybe I can just find a picture to post instead...
*This is why a key investigative skill of the researcher is to always know when to stop collecting data.
We probably wouldn't have stopped at Mount Rushmore. The whole idea of the place strikes me as sort of creepy, a cheesy melding of patriotic fervor, idolatry, and quasi-religious zeal. It strikes me, in fact, as profoundly un-American, as far as my definition of "American" goes; democratic republics, especially ours, should have no need to put up gigantic Ramses-like statuary to their leaders, no matter how great they might have been.
You could make a lovely mountain into a great paperweight, but can you make it into a wild, natural mountain again? I don't think you have the know-how for that... Maybe it's not too late to put an elevator under this whole shrine of democracy — press a button and the whole monument disappears. And once a week — say, every Sunday from nine to eleven — you press the button again and those four heads come up again with the music going full blast. The guys who got an astronaut on the moon should be able to to this much for us Indians...
I really wish they'd left the mountain alone... but then again, it's not my job to drum up tourism for South Dakota.**
* Quoted in "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse".
** The freakishness of Mount Rushmore pales in comparison to what's being done to Thunderhead Mountain, a few miles to the southwest – in "response" to Rushmore, another mountain in the Sioux's revered Black Hills is being carved up into a gargantuan "likeness" of Crazy Horse, who fought desperately to... well, keep things like that from happening to the Black Hills. But nobody really knows what Crazy Horse looked like, so the huge visage will just be a bland, soulless stereotypical "Indian" face, that probably won't look anything like him anyway. Has the tool yet been invented that could measure the angular momentum of Crazy Horse as he spins in his grave?
