October 31, 2009
Finally, without any further interruption ...
One morning I was up a bit earlier than usual, and I was in the bathroom shaving. It was an hour or so before sunup. The lighting in the bathroom was poor, but there was a security spotlight outside the window, as I recall, so I had opened the…
October 31, 2009
On July 20, Kevin Lily and two friends (Danielle Katz and Brian Coggan) left Bemidji, Minnesota to travel the length of the Mississippi River. They are raising money for local, national and international charities working to alleviate the global water crisis....
Details here
October 31, 2009
"The danger of Halloween is not in the scary things we see but in the secret, wicked, cruel activities that go on behind the scenes. These activities include:
Sex with demons
Orgies between animals and humans
Animal and human sacrifices
Sacrificing babies to shed innocent blood
Rape and…
October 31, 2009
Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and…
October 31, 2009
Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People is the book that the recently published article in Seed Magazine, which was in turn recently banned in an Illinois school is mainly about. Here is the Publishers Weekly overview of the book:
This brilliant and accessible…
October 31, 2009
Dan Delong teaches English at Southwester High School in Piasa, Illinois. He has been suspended for assigning an article originally published in Seed Magazine called "The Gay Animal Kingdom." If you are a teacher you know what to do.. download that article and assign it to all of your students…
October 31, 2009
One of the main reasons we were staying in Kimberley at all was to assist the museum staff with a particular, and rather singular, survey and excavation. The location and circumstances of this field project were quite remarkable.
This was on the location of an historic hunting reserve, where…
October 31, 2009
By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right....
Please read this post at Real Climate and…
October 31, 2009
I spent about 45 minutes yesterday in the local HMO clinic. They had turned the main waiting room into a Pandemic Novel A/H1N1 Swine (nee Mexican) Influenza quarantine area, and I could feel the flu viruses poking at my skin looking for a way in the whole time I was there.
Amanda, who is 8.3…
October 31, 2009
I wrote earlier about the graves that were dug daily to receive the dead. In truth, the details of this procedure are still being worked out by archaeologists at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, but when we were there on this particular trip, part of the grave yard to which I refer had been just…
October 30, 2009
Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story.
As I had mentioned, I had the "hallway extension"…
October 30, 2009
So there we were in the Haunted Guest Quarters of the Old Infirmary, and I had already heard the ghost once. In the morning, my colleague and BFF Lynne who was staying with us for a couple of days noted that she had heard the mysterious footsteps as well....
"Greg, one, maybe both, of your…
October 30, 2009
Shulinab Nursery School is located in a small village of 500 people. The school can't get enough water from rainwater, so they need to set up a system that will let them get water pumped from a nearby windmill. The community will build and maintain the system, but it needs $500 to purchase…
October 30, 2009
Skepchick Rebecca writes about the Low Anthem's song "Oh my god, Charlie Darwin with comes along with a video:
Rebecca has the lyrics and more information, like who this band is and stuff.
October 30, 2009
This is Melisa Riviere. White People sometimes do hip hop. I have a reading suggestion for you. First a little background.
I've gotten into a few arguments on race and racism in my time, some on this blog. Racist thinking is all around us. Why just a few hours ago, a neighbor complained…
October 30, 2009
For Halloween, I'm reprinting the only Ghost Story on my blog (so far). It is in several parts, and here's part one:
Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it may span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or…
October 30, 2009
I would very much like your help in picking out a tee-shirt to wear around town. Let me tell you about the town, and you'll be able to make an appropriate suggestion.
I live in a conservative, working class, quasi-religious city, though my heart is in a nearby radical lefty atheistic edgy cool…
October 29, 2009
Hat Tip: Digital Rabbit
October 29, 2009
I've stopped paying attention to John Stewart and that other guy what's his name at Comedy Central because over the last month or so every single video form that source I've looked at produces this error:
I've checked for this on three different linux machines running two different Ubuntu distros…
October 29, 2009
Hat Tip: Bora
October 29, 2009
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of federally regulated sources for dogs and cats used in medical research, training, an testing, in the US. They are labeled, unambiguously, A and B. A-class sources are breeders that produce animals for use in research. B-class sources, also called "Random…
October 29, 2009
Hat tip: Digital Rabbit
October 29, 2009
Have a look at this veto memorandum written by Arnold Schwarzenegger to kill a bill authored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco. Ammiano is famous for shouting "Kiss my ass" to Arnold at some public event or another.
Tell me, is there a hidden message here?
story here
October 29, 2009
Lest we forget:
The strange part is the applause.
Hat tip aratina
October 29, 2009
Last night, during Teh Game, we were told that Viking Orlando Thomas had died, succumbing to his battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. This is not true.
The initial report to a member of the press was confirmed by seeing a similar report on someone's MySpace web site. But apparently he is alive.
The…
October 29, 2009
If you don't know someone's age, over time they may let out clues that tell you when they were born based on what they remember, or things they claim to have done. This can be very inaccurate. My wife said something the other day that would cause anyone to infer that she was at least ten years…
