May 2006

mad alderman!

I'd like to nominate Councilor Myles Heidt for "Mad alderman of the year" based on his idea that banning knives over 3" in length from being carried anywhere in the city except in private property, but most especially for the following quote: "People nowadays can't manage their lives. They need laws for everything." I find it very disturbing that this person has political power in my life. Very disturbing indeed.
See, on the issue of knives, anything truly dangerous is already illegal and yet the criminals continue to have them. On the issue of laws, making yet more laws won't teach people independence it will teach them yet more reliance on laws. Before long the people become mindless automatons waiting for a tyrant to make them suffer. Then the only way out is revolt and violence. Better to be vigilant against morons like this and stop the constant passing of laws for every detail of your life. Find other ways to solve issues.
~sigh~ I wish I had any power in this. I have not.

Got Milk?

The tv show "how it is made" just blew my mind with a segment on a modern dairy farm. The automatic scraper in the barn I knew about. That the cows enter and leave on their own choice surprised me. The nifty motion activated scratching brushes they can walk up to when they itch pleased me. I mean, that's luxury, you know? But the thing that blew my mind was the automatic milking system. The cow walks into the milking stall when SHE feels the need to be milked. Yes, that's right, the cows decide when they're milked. Then a robotic system cleans the teats, finds them with lasers, attaches the suction cups one at a time, pulls and analyzes the milk, drains each teat dry and releases. After this the teats are sprayed with another disinfectant and the door opens to let the happy cow out. At no time was she more than a body length away or visually separated from her herd. This blew my mind. I like! It's a wonderful thing that happy cows give more milk as it ensures that milk cows are treated humanely. About the only part that isn't is that their babies are taken from them at birth. This, however, probably can't be helped. It may even not be that hard on them, perhaps they have evolved the ability to shrug it off as dairy cows, where other cattle would need a maternal instinct, dairy cattle would suffer from it. The farmer who can afford such a system is a very fortunate farmer. He still has to attend to the veterinary issues, handling the babies, fixing the machines, carting off the manure, etc., but he's not enslaved to the 2x/day milking schedule anymore and that is as good for the cows as for him! Many cow problems were caused by not being milked timely enough or thoroughly enough. (I did a stint on a dairy farm and learned a lot.) Nifty stuff. Moooooo!

something I said on a list today.

The belief that mathematics can explain creation and underpins all that is, is also a faith which has yet to be proved. It's my belief that paradox is the foundation of eternity and the pivot point on which reality hangs as a mobious balanced on a point of a black hole, twisted in and through itself to begin anew at the point of it's ending.

crazy dream

I dreamt it was snowing then storming then the wind got so strong it took the top of a huge tree off. A chunk of trunk 6' long and 3' in diameter goes flying across the yard, takes out the fence between here and the neighbor's house then rolls off lightly down the street after crashing through the back fence. Before long the entire fence was gone, even the picket fence round front. As the storm ended I surveyed the damage. Kids on bikes and homeless old alkies immediately charged into my yard to occupy it, trampling everything. Sarah got lost chasing Shannon's dog (remember Shannon? No? used to be a neighbor and a friend but too addicted to crap so I dumped her). I was trying to find chunks of my fence blown all over so I could save some money on new bits. I wondered if insurance would pay for a new fence. The storm's violence in my dream was terrific to watch.

Really gonna get married!

The date is set! We'll be married at 3pm on May 30th at this cute little place: The Hitching Post in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho.

David Blaine Drowned Alive

I think it's COOL. I want that sphere to play in! I want a sphere of water like that in my back yard to swim in. Damn that's cool. I think all his stunts are cool. I liked him from the first time I saw him with that spiffy levitation he does. I haven't yet figured out HOW he does it.
Now I'm reading all kinds of criticism that he's not doing anything so terribly impressive. Yah, I'd like to see you survive just two hours of not doing anything and then reassess the challenge! Can you successfully sit for 2 hours even in a public square and not talk to anyone, read a book, listen to music or otherwise? How many hours could you sit like that before going stir crazy? No game, no cell phone, nothing. That much alone is a challenge and you know it! Now team up the other aspects, such as fasting and being unable to get up or being waterlogged. Now add in public abuse and attention. He may not be getting food thrown at his sphere in New York but he is sure to get abuse of some kind all the same. Making faces, yelling insults, and so forth, is still going to happen.
Is it magic? No. What is your lable? Are you a brick layer? Does that mean you wouldn't take money for giving someone a ride across town if the job came along, or paint a house if you had a house to paint? Blaine is an illusionist but he's also a stunt artist and this is a stunt and it's art. Look at the sphere, the image of the man floating in glass like that, and with the nifty fish swimming. Human gold fish! It's pure art of the most definite kind. More captivating than a urinal on it's side or a shovel leaned against a gallery wall or 4 color breakdown of a soup can or Marilyn Monroe. I'm completely impressed.
I wonder how much that sphere would cost to reproduce for my own yard? Damn that's cool. Hey David, can I have your bubble when you're done? I wanna do water dancing in it, naked, in my back yard! WooooHooooo!

Houseparty hosts aren't to blame for dui guests

While I'm an avid supporter of anti-dui laws I heartily disagreed with the idea that a host should somehow be able to stop a guest from driving drunk. I know one person who constantly drives home drunk. Nothing can be said to make him do otherwise even though he lives just 5 blocks from work where he drinks at the parties and drives home. You can't even offer him a ride. Nothing works. He becomes violent if you attempt force. Imagine if I had a party with drinks and brought this man, who otherwise is a valued friend, and was expected to stop him from drinking and driving? Even when he's not drinking he won't listen to reason on the matter, insisting he's careful enough when he does this. The only thing one could possibly do is phone the police when he leaves and give them his license # and *maybe* they'd find him before he got home. Because no tragedy has yet resulted he's convinced his behaviour is okay.
I believe he is typical of the sort of intractible drunk driver that party hosts would have been expected to police. It's asking too much. People already rarely have houseparties anymore and it's getting worse! I'd love to have a party but if a guest brought himself a mickey of rum and got drunk and left in a huff and drove off, why would I be liable?

I've started podcasting!

Now you can HEAR my dulcett tones and random babblings! Yes, now when you can't read me because you're just too gosh darn busy with housework, driving, cycling, or whatever floats your boat, you can play my 30 minute mp3 show! If you use a podcasting client then the rss file you need is at http://www.villasubrosa.net/webcast/autopilot.rss so just copy and paste that into your podcasting client. When I get the html written I'll have a link on my main site allowing you to do that again, also linking to the directory where the podcasts will be stored and in there a page allowing you to download each mp3 directly for folks who are curious but don't have the software.
Sourceforge has done us yet another awesome favour in creating Juice podcasting client and Audacity audio editor.http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ The former is a free cross platform client that makes keeping up to date with podcasts a simple process. The latter is a marvelous sound editing and recording program that lets me compose my show for you.
The show is intended to be a weekly half hour of pretty much the same things I used to do on anarchy radio on the local community radio. Now it's doubtless I'll have to stay marginalized because I'm using copywrited music without permission in my podcasts but hey, if you know me, you know I am a terrible scofflaw on that level. So expect lots of music just like on the radio! Just don't promote me into infamy because then RIAA and related assholes will descend on me and take my computer and put a lien on my house and, uhm, just what CAN they do a broke bum? Well I suppose with Dan by my side I might actually have an income to garnishee. This, however, is negotiable. The kind of work we do is very well suited to the black market. I suppose they might be able to get my internet connection shut down.
Oh bother it, I hate daymares. Suffice it to say, lets just keep these podcasts on the down-low, ok?
Ok, work to do, gotta go, bye!

Hungary workers get shock at bottom of rum barrel

Thu May 4, 2006 9:49am ET10

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian builders who drank their way to the bottom of a huge barrel of rum while renovating a house got a nasty surprise when a pickled corpse tumbled out of the empty barrel, a police magazine website reported.
According to online magazine www.zsaru.hu, workers in Szeged in the south of Hungary tried to move the barrel after they had drained it, only to find it was surprisingly heavy and were shocked when the body of a naked man fell out.
The website said that the body of the man had been shipped back from Jamaica 20 years ago by his wife in the barrel of rum in order to avoid the cost and paperwork of an official return.
According to the website, workers said the rum in the 300-liter barrel had a "special taste" so they even decanted a few bottles of the liquor to take home.
The wife has since died and the man was buried in a proper grave.

podcast exploration

I was reading the news at the cbc's saskatchewan site and they had a podcast available. Just a simple mp3 that's 30 mins long and encapsulates some news. Hmmmmm. So I loaded it onto my mp3 player and went into google to find a podcast client. It gave the url for subscribing to the podcast with one's podcast client. The client fetches mp3s from podcast collections on the net. I got juice from sourceforge. I've collected a few things and we'll see if I like them. They're literally radio shows. Like recording a half hour show and encoding it into mp3 to play on your player later. One advantage over just tuning in the radio is that if the show sucks I can forward to the next and if they all suck revert to music I've saved on the other disk in the player.
So far I'm just trying out what's made available in the client. There are no summaries or descriptions really to clue me what it's about so I'll have to taste as I go. It's got me wanting to create my own though, really. Like back when I was on the community radio. Only thing is haven't got a mixing board or anything so it'd be pretty basic. Well we'll see :-) I don't have time for that now anyway.