Skub!

On the one hand I want to write this off as the most asinine opinion piece I've ever read in any newspaper (and considering I have, on at least on occasion, paged through the (London) Sun, that's saying a lot.) (It had been discarded on a seat on the Tube, and I'd finished my book.)

On the other hand, I do admit a grudging respect for the NY Sun, rushing to the defense of that lifelong friend of American everywhere, the Oreo.

In other dessert news, in my quest for eye drops today, I discovered that holy crap Albertson's sells Pocky. I wasn't expecting that.


(Also: Skub.)

Regrettably not aliens

My floor lap is on and the little bendy arm is as always pointed up and out a bit, because I'm not currently on my bed.

I just glanced out the partially-opened window to see a reflection of the lit bulb of said light, which is in fact pointing 90 degrees away from the window.

For a moment I hoped it was in fact a sign of an impending alien invasion. Unfortunately it's nothing more than the reflection of a reflection - the lamp is facing the mirror, which in turn is facing the window.

Oh really?

Got a reference question over the phone today at work. A guy who calls in with some frequency and astoundingly dull questions that could be solved with an encyclopedia and/or three minutes of Googling. He's looking for a certain poem with a certain rhyme, and he's got the author's name. Easy.

"You know, I was talking to Jerry Garcia."

*blink*. Well, his last question I took was something about potential Antichrists as per certain Nostradamus predictions, so it's not unknown that he's a bit off.

"This was way back in the 60's, before the Grateful Dead. I was writing a book called 'Deadheads', and, well, you know the rest of the story. He stole my name. But, these things happen, you know?"

I managed not to laugh until after I'd put the phone down, then spent the next twenty minutes giggling hysterically. And for what it's worth - I've taken about five reference questions from this guy since June, and each time he's "writing a book" on an entirely different topic.

Someday...

Someday, I will ride all the way back to campus up Camino Cabra. I will ride all the way, not at any point need to stop and walk my bike or rest, and I will not feel like death once I finally get to the top.

It's great fun to ride down, but seriously, who the hell builds roads that freaking steep? And it's not a case of 'this road has some nasty steep bits' but 'sweet jesus I'm not Spider Man and can't walk up walls!'

Harry Potter. A review, I guess

Obviously, spoilers lurk ahead, so don't read them if you don't want.

Ready?

Good.

Quality-wise, I think that Deathly Hallows was pretty much on the same level as all the others. I've always thought that Rowling's strength lay not in plots but characters, and I think that book 7 exemplified this. The Ron/Hermione/Harry bickering felt extremely real: put any close friends that age in a stressful situation and people will get pissed off over stupid little things.

I actually thought that Harry seemed much less confident in this book than the prior ones, such as the way he got somewhat obsessed with the idea of the Hallows, and I think that was a smart move on Rowling's part. I imagine it would have been excessively easy to go the wrong way and not have Harry make important mistakes and not have him struggle; this made him seem a bit more human and believable.

The ending was OK. I wasn't particularly thrilled with it though I also wasn't disappointed. Almost all the loose ends were at least mostly tied up by the end, which is quite a feat when you consider the scope of the series. I'm torn how I feel about the reveal about Snape's agreement with Dumbledore - on the one hand it's nice to finally have an answer as to whether or not he was a good guy, but on the other, there was something appealing about having him ambiguous. I think that were Rowling's main audience younger (as they are still ostensibly kid's books) it would have been better leaving it an unknown, but for the wee ones I think that closure was good.

The one thing I didn't like was the happy-ever-after epilogue bit. For one, I don't particularly like warm fuzzy "everyone lives happily ever after and they don't have any scary problems any more" no matter what. And secondly I didn't find it terribly believable, at least as Harry's future. Here's this kid who has a fairly miserable childhood, gets a glimpse of getting out of it when he goes away to boarding school...and then he spends the next seven years of his life, from 11 to 18 years of age, literally fighting for his life. Sure he's also fighting for his friends and the Greater Good and puppies and all that, but it boils down to "There's this nasty dude who tried to kill you before, failed, and is really pissed off over that." So he spends all of his teen years quite literally fighting evil, finally wins, and then what, settles down into dull domestic bliss? I'm not entirely sold on that; I imagine he'd still be working off a bit of inner anguish at that point.

But all in all, it's a very sound YA book and a decent end to a decent saga. There were plenty of little things that tickled me (Luna's role, the throwaway about Neville being a professor at Hogwarts at the end, the brief reference to what Dumbledore said he saw in the mirror from book 1, etc).

Harry Potter

Eh. Pretty decent. More of a writeup later. For now I'll just say there is something inherently satisfying in finishing a 700-page book in less than 24 hours, just because you can.

Yep

And here is the rain.

I do like rain and I think it's even nicer in the desert.

Oh, good grief

So I wander down into town today with a few things to do. The first is just get off the mountain for a bit, but along the way there's a few grocery items to pick up, a paycheck to deposit, some library books to return, and so on.

Note those last two.

I put the check and library books in my bag and ride into town. The library is my first stop. Books are returned, Newsweek is paged through, a John LeCarre novel is picked up. At this point I'm very hungry, so I go and grab some food and bask in the touristy sunlight for a bit. Then past the bank on my way to the grocery store.

No check in my bag.

Okay. I stop and think. Am I sure that I grabbed it off my desk this morning? Positive. I distinctly remember picking it up, as my keys were on top of it. I put my library books in my bag, put the check in my bag, grabbed my bike helmet...

...library books, check.

You know that thing that's more a physical sensation than an emotional reaction? Where it's like all your internal organs try to shrink up into the tiniest possible package as if hiding from some ominous hunter? The feeling that can best be summed up as "Oh shit, I think I just did something really monumentally stupid"?

Yep, that one.

I race back down the street to the library, and explain to the librarian at the circ desk that I returned two books about an hour or so ago and think I maybe left something kind of extremely important in one of them, like my paycheck. She was very nice, helped me find the books (still on the shelving cart, thankfully). There tucked just inside the cover of one of them was my check. Crisis averted, and were it not for the overwhelming sense of relief I would have been deeply embarrassed.

The check is now safely within the belly of an ATM, a much more suitable home for it. And I had impeccable timing coming back from the grocery store to catch the bus back up the mountain; clouds rolled in as we drove up and thunder started as soon as I got into my room. (note: thunder does not necessarily mean it's actually going to rain. This is Santa Fe, after all.)

Darwin's asleep at the wheel

A couple enterprising young folks were trying to strip the pipes and wiring off of a disused nursing home, to sell the copper (apparently that's the thing to do these days.)

Thing is it wasn't entirely disused. The local police now use it as a K-9 training spot.

To the would-be criminals defense it doesn't sound like there were any dogs actually there when they started their shenanigans. But a place that's clearly marked as a police training ground may not be the best place to rob, y'know?

Oh hell.

Dick Cheney's the President now.

Hm. I wonder if he's still not part of the executive branch?

In an entirely unrelated note, avocados are really tasty, and I'm glad I treated myself to one the other day.

Signature

Apparently this little promotional bit of animation won some award at the Cannes. Very well done, I think - Amnesty is one of those organizations that can be a bit tricky to sum up concisely, but I think this does a very nice job.

Amused again

Got a reference question first thing this morning at work.

About Nostradamus, and his predictions about "mabus", and who this person may be. Apparently the mabus is someone whose death will bring about the end of the world. There will also be a comet involved.

Here's a potential list I found for the guy. It's quite equal opportunity; not many lists of potential world-enders include George H.W. Bush, both Clintons, Ariel Sharon, and Yasser Arafat.

I managed to have a brief conversation about this without laughing, too. I was proud of myself.

I know where not to look for the Fountain of Youth...

Best headline of the day: Toronto's population ages.

...slow news day in Toronto, eh?

*cue maniacal giggling*

Some mad genius did a bit of editing on a video of one of those Christian revival things that centers around lots of shouting and some guy with artificially fluffy hair knocking people over and screaming "Praise Jesus!".

Then they slapped Drowning Pool's Bodies over it all, and the result is absolute blasphemers
gold.

Priorities, priorities

This CNN/CareerBuilder.com piece lists the 12 most "everlasting" jobs - jobs which they say will always exist, regardless of how society moves: Doctor, teacher, mortician, waste disposal, scientist, tax collector, barber, soldier, farmer, religious leader, law enforcement, construction worker.

Apparently the average teacher makes slightly less than to slightly more than one-third what the average doctor makes. Median salary for doctors: $120,000. K-12 teachers: $41,000 - $45,000.

Can someone explain to me why we're willing to dump money on doctors but not teachers? Give me a choice between a society without doctors and a society without k-12 teachers, and I'll pick the former in an instant. Not to mention the fact that it seems in modern medical systems doctors don't actually, you know, do anything: nurses deal with patients, techs draw blood and hand out medications, doctors take a glance at all the observations the nurse has written down, stamp their signature on it, and charge you two hundred bucks for it.

Hm.

My father is a fairly avid biker (Spandex type, not Harley type). He's been going on some group rides apparently, and one of the leaders of the group is a 71-year-old woman who once was overweight, decided to get back into shape (in her late 60's), and lost 75 pounds mostly by riding a total of over 3,000 miles over two years.

That, uh, makes me feel even more lame about when the hills in Santa Fe kick my ass. But seriously, who the hell builds a road at, like, a 15% upgrade?

Also, Dad, stop reading my blog at work. Tsk-tsk. (Referrer logs don't lie.)

Tax money at work

TSA is more likely to confiscate a water bottle than a bomb.

Thank god airport screeners are there to keep us safe.

Good news, bad news

The bad news is that my eyes have not miraculously become functional. They have, in fact, gotten a tiny bit worse.

The good news is that since my eyes are so very good at being bad (quote from the tech/assistant/whoever guy when I showed him my previous prescription: "huh, you have really bad eyes."), new contacts are in fact a "medical necessity", which means under my insurance I didn't need to make a co-pay, and apparently it's possible (though I'm dubious about that). Also, NM state law apparently is stricter when it comes to contacts and a doctor can only give you a prescription for one year. Grr.

In other news, a hill in Santa Fe kicked my ass today again. Someday I will conquer it.

Oh, good god.

YouTube - Laminar Flow

I don't understand what's going on here but I don't care because it very much appears to violate the laws of...everything.

Oh god, America.

1. STOP IT WITH THE PANTS. I was happy before because I thought I would never again read a news story about someone suing over freaking pair of pants. If you're that upset about a dry cleaner misplacing an item of your clothing then you are A) paying way to damn much for your clothes, B) a shallow, self-centered freak, or C) both A and B and also a nincompoop.

2. I was planning on going to see Sicko tomorrow but I may or may not have to postpone it, because I had to make an appointment to get my eyes checked, because I'm going to need new contacts within a few months and may or may not have insurance past this month.

I think it says something that I need to postpone seeing a movie about how borked American health insurance is because my own health insurance is borked.

3. Philly doesn't want kids to help the homeless. I admit that the best way to help the homeless is not to give them food, it's to make them not homeless any more. However, that's not likely to happen anytime soon, especially not in Philadelphia, which of course is known for it's loving, caring, upright government.

But it's not like they're handing out cash that could easily be spent on drugs and alcohol or anything else not-helpful*. They're giving out food. Toothbrushes. Blankets. You know, things that primarily serve to keep people from dying, and maybe will in fact help them get off the streets. A school is helping others and using it as a civics lesson for it's students; I have no problem with that.

*Actually, if someone's a serious alcoholic one of the most dangerous things they could do would be abruptly stop drinking. I've read that alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs to detox from.

4. The RIAA can go rot in hell. Idiots.

In which MA is confused.

Massachusetts is making it mandatory for it's residents to have health insurance. On the surface? Could potentially be a step in the right direction.

Only they're not going to regulate the cost of health insurance any more than they already do.

If you can't prove on your tax return that you have coverage, you'll lose a $219 exemption. Businesses not offering insurance will have to pay $295/employee.

Those who do not qualify for subsidies and cannot get coverage through their jobs can buy low-cost but unsubsidized health plans offered by private insurers through the Connector under the Commonwealth Choice program. Premiums go up with age, but people cannot be charged more if they are sick or be denied coverage because of a preexisting condition.

This is the problem. The people who suffer the most aren't the absolute poorest. There are options for those at the absolute bottom of the financial scale - not good options, but options. But then you get a group of people who aren't quite poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, but simply can't afford normal insurance premiums, even the low-cost programs (which, no doubt, have incredibly high deductibles and provide absolute bare-bones coverage).

Health care in this country is such a mess, and watching ourselves try to fix it is like watching a car accident in slow motion, over and over again.

Oops.

Stupid, probably drug-addled man tries to torch a women's health clinic because they perform abortions.

Only...they don't perform abortions.

That's like the Reese's Cups of stupidity: stupid surrounded by even more stupid.

Whoa

I have no idea when it happened, or maybe it's always been there and I just haven't noticed, but I just discovered something new with Google Maps. Look up directions between two points. Now mouse over the little blue line...and you can adjust it to take you on whatever route your little heart desires between point A and point B.

*glee*

It's interactive! And lets you play around to find your own route, which is very useful if you're, say, traveling by bicycle and want to avoid the terrifying roads with heavy traffic and no shoulder and insane Santa Fe drunk drivers!