Efficiency is our game!

Modern logistical processes are so strange: the replacement for that non-DVD from Amazon started in Phoenix (about 500 miles from Santa Fe). It then went about three hundred miles west (note: away from Santa Fe) to Ontario, California, where it was loaded into a plane and flown to Albuquerque.

I'm pretty sure just driving a truck to Albuquerque would have taken the same amount of time, really.

Hometown pride!

"You have a special, insulated room meant for special-needs students to use to calm down! How dare you!"

Ah, Cherry Hill.

Some damn fine detective work

Someone calls the police and says that they have found a skull. They think it may be real because it's a neighborhood with a lot of crime*.

The police come, rope the "crime scene" off, and...send a picture of the skull to some UNM anthropologists, presumably in Albuquerque. Note that there apparently is no one on the Santa Fe police who can differentiate between a real skull and a child-sized plastic toy.

Apparently, the ability to make a distinction is also a rare talent at UNM, where two people first confirmed it was real before realizing that, you know, it was fake, made of plastic, and anatomically incorrect.

This took 3 1/2 hours, during which I'm sure the Santa Fe police could have been out doing actual police work, such as enforcing traffic laws, arresting drunk drivers, and perhaps ensuring the safety of the local Dunkin Donuts. Instead our tax money paid for three hours of investigating a plastic decoration.

I want my money back.

*Not that while Santa Fe has some not-great areas, the crime rate is probably below average for a town this size. When half your population is old retired wannabe artists who do nothing but paint lousy nature scenes, you're pretty safe. There were an astounding 9 homicides in 2003, with a population of over 65,000.

That doesn't work

Amazon sent me the book I ordered and an empty DVD case.

An empty, shrink-wrapped, security-sealed, takes-ten-minutes-to-open empty DVD case.

Tomorrow I will put it back in the mail to them and hope that they will indeed replace it with a non-empty case.

What's wrong with this country, part ??

Boise, Idaho. 1 AM the day after Thanksgiving.

America's heartland, people. This is our country, unfortunately.

Well, color me stunned.

Apparently, the federal government has been giving a number of native tribes in Virginia a hard time, claiming that they aren't Indian enough. They wanted to see proof that they'd been there at least since the first contact with Europeans.

If you know anything at all about all European newcomers' relationships with the indigenous population, this is not at all a surprise (and no, it's not just the British/Americans who were jerks; the Spaniards were all sorts of horrifying). But what gets me the most is this:

It would mean that they could finally petition the federal government to return the bones of their ancestors from the drawers and boxes of Smithsonian warehouses to be buried with respect, something that only tribes with federal status are allowed to do.

What the hell? I'm not one for burial rituals - someone's dead and they're dead, it's over, and if it were up to me we'd just leave things back to nature without ceremony - but what is this about? You need the government to approve your culture before you can own your people's relics? That strikes me as just a pointlessly jerkish thing to do.

Pretty pretty

The library has acquired the four-disc set of BBC's Planet Earth series. I grabbed first two discs for my viewing pleasure over break, and have watched the first and second episodes.

All I have to say is holy crap. The filming is magnificent. The narration is fascinating. The scenery is jaw-droppingly, 'I want to crawl through the screen and be there' beautiful.

Thus, my unrequited crush on the BBC continues.

The cutest police officer I've ever seen

The British Transportation Police at King's Cross have adopted a cat in order to deal with the mouse problem.

(the cat's the cute one, obviously).

Again with the mocking WBC

Westboro Baptist Church was recently ordered to pay nearly $11mil to the family of a marine who's funeral they protested at.

Westboro Baptist Church has about $1mil in assets.

Attorney Sean Summers, who represented Albert Snyder, the father of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, said after the financial records were unsealed Tuesday that he believed the defendants could be forced to sell church property to satisfy the judgment.

Again, it's not particularly nice of me to feel such glee at a slightly ridiculous judgment, but...the WBC isn't particularly nice, either. So there.

Thank you Senator Specter!

Sen. Specter has been trying to squirrel away nearly $900,000 for abstinance-only sex ed in PA.

“There are people who say that abstinence education doesn’t work,” Mr. Specter said, but “I’ve seen a lot of indicators that it does work.” In addition, he said, “I have 12 million people in Pennsylvania, they have a lot of different ideas,” some of them strongly favor abstinence education, and their values “ought to be recognized.”

Okay. What evidence is there that it does work? Because a minute or two with Google reveals plenty of evidence it doesn't, and, uh...none that it does.

So, yeah, let's try to spend that money on something that doesn't work, because Specter has seen "indicators" that it does work.

I <3 PBF

Hahaha.

Hee.

Hah.

Por que no te callas?

Here is a video of the king of Spain* telling Hugo Chavez to shut up.

Apparently during an Ibero-American summit meeting, the PM of Spain was speaking. Hugo Chavez (whose microphone was off) kept interrupting. Eventually, the king of Spain, sitting next to the PM, leaned forward to face Chavez and said, "Why don't you just shut up?"

I love when diplomats say 'the hell with this politeness crap' and say what they're really thinking. (Also, while I'm not a rabid Chavez-hater, the guy's a total moonbat and does, sometimes, need to shut up.)

*Apparently they still have a king, which I had absolutely no idea of.

Whoa

Lately I've been having a bit of difficulty sleeping, especially after I twisted my sleep schedule around a bit while working on a big essay a while ago. Tired of waking up not at all rested, I picked up some melatonin at the store the other day. I'm not comfortable with most typical sleep aids for a variety of reasons, but some research showed melatonin to be cheap, not likely at all to leave me groggy, no problems taking it as frequently or infrequently as needed, and generally safe. The only real side effect I read about was vivid dreams and/or nightmare, which was fairly negligible.

They are very much not joking about that. Oh man are they not joking. I fell asleep in no time at all, which was great, but then last night was the first night in years that I actually woke up from a nightmare and then had trouble calming my brain down. It was incredibly weird, the type of nightmare that was absolutely and completely nonsensical, but it was so vivid I had a rather hard time convincing myself of that. I'm working on writing it up, because it's too damn weird to just let go, but as a preview: I was on a quest for...the secret, hidden laundry room, which apparently was someplace behind a hidden door near the disused pool. The quest got delayed because of the mummified remains sealed in the glass-encased portable sauna machine. Then things started to get weird.

I'm not going to write melatonin off entirely because of that (I did sleep well up until that), but if/when I take it again, no more movies about serial killers before bed. (Memories of Murder, btw, a Korean thriller. Very good.)

I don't care about your big house.

Here's yet another NYTimes article about the housing market. It's pretty much the same as everything else recent on the topic: the housing market has basically crashed. Lots of people lost lots of money.

In my admittedly uneducated opinion those who have directly suffered* fall into one of two categories. There are those who were irresponsible with their money and took out a mortgage they really couldn't afford and were (gosh, the surprise!) eventually burnt by it. This problem could have been avoided by not taking out a loan you couldn't afford. Yes, to a certain extent the banks were 'preying' on consumers, but when it comes down to it, you're responsible for your own financial well-being. If that means renting instead of buying, or buying smaller, or in a different area, then be an adult and deal with it. I had some sympathy but it's limited for these folks.

The second type of people I have no sympathy for, and those are 'house flippers' - apparently it's a big thing to buy foreclosed houses, reno them, and sell them at a profit. This is only going to work if the housing market is good, and if it rather suddenly goes from 'really really good', as it was, to 'utter crap', as it is now, you're going to find yourself in trouble. The guy in the Times article learned this the hard way. He bought a million-dollar house, a BMW, a Corvette. Then the money ran out and now, boo-hoo, he doesn't have his big fancy toys anymore.

Are we seriously supposed to have sympathy for these people? You go, you make some money, and then rather than investing it responsibly and safely, you buy a bunch of extravagant crap and then weep when it goes sour? I have a hard time seeing how this is any different from a kid bringing a brand-new, shiny, expensive toy to the playground, and then being stunned to tears when it gets dirty and messed up. The media right now is full of stories like this, and I just don't see how we're supposed to care.

Houses are...places to live. There's no need for them to be huge and expensive, and the idea of using them solely as investment tools is kind of ridiculous.

*I'm not including some of the folks mentioned in the article - plumbers, electricians, carpenters, other various contractors.

Argh

Fun is accidentally spilling a cup of soda all over.

It's even more fun when you then stand up, smack your head on the bottom of the bookshelf, and then knock over the bottle of water you're using to clean up the first spill. Graaaaaarrrrrrgh.

Excuse me, I need to go get my now soda-free laundry into the dryer.

And dammit, it killed my mouse, too, so now I have to go buy another one tomorrow. *grunt*