Condoleeza Hairdo Alert System
Located at Princess Sparkle Pony’s Photo Blog – she keeps track of Condoleeza’s hairdo so we don’t have to.
A list of Post-Modern novels
A MetaFilter list of suggested “sprawling post-modern novels”.
Off the top of my head, I have these that are on their list.
delillo’s underworld
infinite jest
house of leaves
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Ground Beneath Her Feet
Death on the Installment Plan by Celine
Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicon
The Tin Drum
Kentucky Art Car Weekend/Chicago Trip
Stephanie and I are going down to Louisville, Kentucky, again this weekend, this time to meet her friend Lisa from North Carolina, who is road-tripping up for the Kentucky Art Car Weekend. Lisa is coming up in a caravan with her friend Sarah, who has an art car in the art car show. Lisa will also be webcamming her trip up, and the show.
Then we’re heading up to Chicago, to visit the Art Institute, the Fluevog Store, The Cloud Gate Sculpture in Millenium Park, and perhaps other Chicago attractions.
“Fair” Tax is only fair to the Rich
Read this great threat at TMPCafe for information about why — including the most enlightening comments. Also, for all Democrats who desperately need to brush up on this issue before the GOP blitz, here’s a great site: TaxWisdom.org
Paper towels: One roll for 99 cents, 3 for $2.50. If you can buy three rolls right now, you get 50% off the third roll. If you only have money for one roll, you don’t get that discount.
Credit: The less you need the credit, the less of a risk you are to the lender. Say you keep a credit card “for emergencies.” Say you’re honest about that, you really don’t buy dinner out on the thing, you really don’t even use it. A poor person can expect, of course, to pay a higher interest rate on carried balances. But, also… they can expect to pay a $6 a month “membership fee” or some such nonsense.
Services you don’t think about: Say you’re well off, you bought a new car recently, and it breaks. It’s got a warranty. You take it the dealer. The apologize profusely. They fix the thing. While they’re fixing it, they get you a rental car. You’re a AAA member and AAA gave you a free tow to the garage. You’re inconvenienced, but not out much but time. Same thing happens to a poorer person: You drive a used car, no warranty. Nobody comps you a rental car. There’s no spare car at home for you to use. You just shelled out for a tow. Maybe, you’ll pay extra for a rush job on your car, you need it to get to work. Oh, did I mention it’s a used car? The mechanic says he hasn’t seen one like this in awhile. And that means he needs to order parts….
and this
A consumption tax creates an incentive to save. This is generally good, but what happens when the wealthy actually start saving more? Tax receipts drop (at least temporarily). So how does the government meet it’s obligations? Either it borrows more (god forbid) or it raises taxes. And who pays the raised taxes under a consumption tax? People who are spending–i.e., the people living paycheck to paycheck. For all the theoretical reasons a consumption tax might be good, I think in practice it will simply result in the tax burden being transfered to the poor.
Money better spent
A great New York Times op/ed piece on how bottled water is not really better for you, and how it’s an enormous waste of money and natural resources. Here’s the real kicker, though:
Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.
More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world’s population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.
Let me point out that not only could the cost of clean water be easily covered by not buying bottled water… but we’ve spent upwards of 300 billion dollars in Iraq. That’s almost 30 times what it would cost to make sure every human on earth had clean water, eliminating 80 of all the illnesses in the world.
That’s what we could have done with the money we’ve spent killing people in an illegal, unethical, pointless war.
What else could we have done with that money? Heck, for $46 billion, we could give every American health care insurance. And technically, it wouldn’t even cost that, because once all Americans were insured, the insurance overhead and medical administrative costs would go down.
Secret Societies
I’m in the middle of reading:
Secret Societies Handbook
by Michael Bradley
A History of Secret Societies
by Arkon Daraul
And I’m fascinated, especially by the Handbook, because it lists the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome and the Council on Foreign Relations; all are real groups that seem to have major influence on world events. Which makes me glad that Wikipedia has a whole section for secret societies.
Stopping Nightmares
2019 Update: Not sure why I was having nightmares or why I thought these articles would help. I guess I got over it.
Open-Heart Surgery on TV
Battlestar Galactica: on a recent episode, Captain Adama was shot, and was starting to code blue. Not having a defibulator handy, the medic opted to crack open his chest and massage his heart to restart it. Immediately after the procedure they show him lying on the table, with very few monitors around, with a simple tube in his nose. The scar from the surgery was too high up, it started at the base of his neck, and it looked like a simple red mound, not sewn-together flesh, as it should have looked. It should also have a lump at the top of the scar where a hematoma forms, and there should be other scars where drainage tubes would be inserted, etc.
I know the show is set thousands of years in the past, when their technology was far more advanced than ours (according to the show’s mythology) but not a very convincing portrayal of the surgery, nonetheless. I’m betting that, contrary to what it would be like in real life, he recovers soon and is up and about giving commands and being active.
Wonderfalls: In one of the episodes, a security guard from the gift shop has a heart attack during a robbery. In the cut outtakes of the show, the guard returns later after bypass surgery to show off his (very unrealistic) scar.
Heck, costume & makeup guys, you can find video on the internet that not only lets you see a surgery in progress, it shows what the scars looks like immediately afterward and at various points during the recovery process. There’s no reason you should not get the scars right on a TV show.
Shorthand
No time, just recording these:
Renegade Art
Batman’s bust
Something to read further
Pre-1960s Bollywood posters
Weekend Update: King Kong at IMA
Stephanie and I saw King Kong with Dan and Doug, Josh, and David and Garrett on the Terrace at the IMA. It was great fun; the sound was much better than in the past, and I love seeing movies with Dan and Doug; I haven’t done that much recently, and I miss it. I spent a few minutes in the giftshop of the IMA while I was waiting around to buy tickets. They don’t carry as many art books as they used to, but it all looks very nice. I’m looking forward to visiting the IMA to see exhibits.
George and Timmy enjoy Kong
Photo Set: Pictures from the King Kong.
On Saturday, I got a lot of weeding done (I filled my entire trash dumpster with weeds) and managed to put a few items on eBay, so I rewarded myself with playing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Xbox. It’s an older game I got used, but it’s a lot of fun. Stephanie and I caught up on watching Big Brother 6 in the evening.
Sunday morning, I mowed the lawn for the very first time since my surgery. I felt fine and really had fun doing it. I love mowing the lawn. I also did more weeding and cleaned up the side of the house where we broke out the stairs a bit. There’s lots more to do there, but it looks better. And I spent the afternoon at Stephanie’s house helping her and her dad get her basement organized and building shelves for her VW collection.
I’ve been feeling much better lately; like I did before the surgery, only with more energy. There were times before where I was doing something active and I felt like I was climbing a steep hill; now I can do the same things and have energy left over. I’m not as strong as I used to be; I can’t lift things like I could before. But that’s just because I was fairly inactive for four months. I’ll regain muscle as I keep working.
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