It means “a society without children.” Supposedly it means economic disaster.
A former prime minister who is in charge of the governing party’s committee on population famously told women to stay at home and breed.
Fightin’ words, dude. Your economy would be better served by more working-age adults in the workplace, not by sending half of them home to make babies and letting the other half stay out til all hours “working” (actually, drinking with their cow-orkers).
A Southern Utah bank failed because they put too much faith in their neighbors’ ability to pay back loans. Turns out their neighbors had no intention of making good on their financial committments, because they expected either the world to end, or to move lock, stock, and barrel to Texas.
The Bank of Ephraim had profited for many years from higher-interest loans to the sect, whose members live in the twin cities of Hildale and Colorado City astride the Utah-Arizona state line. But eventually the bank “got in too deep,” investing heavily in increasingly risky ventures with sect members who “didn’t have much to lose,” Utah Banking Supervisor Jim Thomas said.
“They were locked into a community that is “not normal,” Thomas said.
The sect is one of many polygamist splinter groups in Utah and Arizona. They have more property and businesses than most, kept going on the cheap labor provided by all the progeny. It and other groups literally trade on the unquestioning faith (some would call it gullibility) of its members and other locals; no one would dream of questioning their motives or business practices, so they get away with… well, a lot.
I always knew my old school was just a little cooler than the other places I considered for my not-so-brilliant college career. They just bought 250,000 scifi “zines” from a long-time collector.
As it happens, a good deal of my time at UO was spent reading science fiction… probably one reason why my academic career wasn’t so brilliant.
Via BoingBoing
Rance checks in… or has been checked in involuntarily… from an asylum for the severely mentally disturbed. His physician grappled with the Dx; at first he was suspecting multiple personalities, animal-related disassociative disorders, and (possibly) schizophrenia.
This changed when Rance received a supervised visit from one of the “imaginary” characters. Medication was reduced, increased, and reduced again. Finally, a breakthrough:
12/5 Evening. Patient finally awoke. For the first time in several weeks, he was calm and lucid, answered only to the name on his medical records and driver’s license, and purported to be no one else. Patient also proposed to his underpaid and heavily-in-debt psychiatrist (which is to say, alas, myself) that he give me an automobile, a Dodge Viper, in exchange for my permitting him to transmit a brief note to Rubber Duckie and the rest of his coterie. Of course, any such a barter would be in flagrant violation of the rules.
12/6 I am duty-bound to record that an acquaintance informed me of the cash value of the Dodge Viper, lest anyone mistake my motivation: I determined the Viper served Patient not as transportation so much as a sparkling red means of avoidance in terms of confronting his insecurities. Accordingly, I thought it best to let him give the automobile to me. To enable him to feel rewarded by the step, I deliver herewith his note, transcribed from Patient’s writing in non-injurious crayon:
Dear Friends:
Happy Hanukkah, Christmas, Thanksgiving (belatedly (sorry)), etc. I miss you lots and wish you were here–and not just so you could spring me.
Later,
R
It’s nice to hear from Rance after a long hiatus; I guess he didn’t succumb to bad shrimp, wacky starlets, or too heavy a courseload at University of Toledo Community Tech
after all.
I realize that all sorts of people claim to have ID’d Rance, but he’ll always be that uber-bright kid working at Fatburger and living in his parents’ Toledo basement to me.
Friday wasn’t such a great time.
We went to the holiday party for David’s company, and it seemed to start off well – lots of people, nice wine to drink, and they didn’t have the creepy, smarmy DJ that they’ve had in years past. They started things off with a fun trivia contest that got everyone at our table laughing and chatting more than in previous years (the employees yak just fine, but the spice tend to sit there trying to make conversation).
And then they served dinner, and then I got sick. Sort of. It was really weird – I was the only one that had fish, which tasted all right, but looked like it was overdone or held too long under a heat lamp.
When I was almost finished with the fish, I started to get a funny aftertaste, and excused myself. Then whilst taking care of a few personal matters, I suddenly felt dizzy and slightly queasy. I went out to the hallway, sat down, felt worse, and thought “Oh, crap.” So I went in to find David and say that we’d have to leave.
Rats. I wonder how the trivia thing turned out? Since we were the Research and Development table, I wonder if they ended up calling our team “Arrested Development” or not? The other likelihood was “Winners” as a team name, but who knows.
Then after getting home, I went straight to bed. I was feeling better almost as soon as I got outside in the clear cold air, but I was tired. So I read and relaxed and drank tea that David brought to me (my schmoopikins!).
And then my husband David came up, very late, and reported that Things Went Very, Very Badly when he tried to do a Linux install. So badly that the whole network was down (a total of 5 computers, with two more not connected). And there was a chance that all the backups had been lost, and all the blog content, and various forms of horror, shock and despair were expressed. So we went to bed hoping it wasn’t as bad as David thought.
Things were grim yesterday morning, so I stayed out of the basement and did (gasp!) housework, because week before last the housecleaning people couldn’t come, and so I did what needed to be done and even cleaned out my closet and vacuumed under the bed, dusted, and so on. More to do tomorrow night, but the house looked fairly good.
Then later Steve came over to help with the problem and lend technical-moral support, and as it happens his friend Fred was in town (we’ve had him over before, and also met him again over dinner and a lot of bagna calda in San Francisco). Another friend, Ruth, came along and met us at (eventually) Babaluci, where the five of us had a very, very pleasant dinner with lots of good belly laughs and good conversation from the heart (there were two Mac gurus at the table, so there was much Mac love expressed).
Afterwards, Fred was freezing cold so we started a fire in the fireplace at home, the guys offered more tech services in the basement, we sat and chatted comfortably, and then the long day was over. It was a very, very nice evening and helped to make up for the interruption in our socializing on Friday.
Today was also very nice, except that I missed my friend Katie’s choral performance – lost track of time completely. However, this morning’s service went pretty well, and we in the church choir got through our party piece. In fact, we sounded pretty good, because we had 2 tenors and 2 basses, yay!
Meanwhile, David got everything working again, very carefully. Eventually, he was able to restore everything from backups except for Friday’s posts, which were still available so long as I didn’t rebuild my blog… so it was simple enough for me to restore by copying the source code of each post and paste it into a “new” draft. I even remembered to roll the date back, and because I copied the source, I got all the links and image tags, too.
So we’re back online. All 2 of you may rejoice with the appropriate level of enthusiasm.
Dinner was an experiment – had a taste for stuffed green peppers, but the recipe I adapted needs more work before it’s ready for prime time. However, I’ll have to remember to buy the Tex-Mex mild chopped tomatoes-and-green-chilies product again, as it had good flavor for the Spanish rice recipe I adapted from Elise’s recipe site.
And now, time for bed. I hope I can get a decent night’s sleep, I haven’t been sleeping well for quite a while.
New images of prisoner torture by US forces in Iraq have surfaced after the AP released images they purchased from an online photo-sharing service after Googling for them. The date-stamping shows they were taken much earlier than the notorious Abu Ghraib images, which date from months later.
The site has since password-protected the pages, but the images are still apparently in Google’s image cache. The BoingBoing post is here; they are asking for help from “133t” readers in Googling more images, or finding the original cache. The photo-link leads to a Spanish newspaper site: the first caption reads “New images of prisoner torture have appeared on the Internet” and notes they pre-date the Abu Ghraib images. Later captions identify the US military personnel as “marines estadounidenses,” but the AP article that broke the story identifies them as (apparently) Navy SEALS. Images from the photosharing site (which includes family photos) indicate that the unit may have been Team Five, as patches with the “V” unit insignia are visible. The family member who uploaded the images is reported to be “upset” that the reporter viewed the images, which were not password protected at the time. It seems that quite a few people will be upset with the family member for uploading the images in the first place, owing to security implications and the SEALS’ policy never to reveal identities or locations of its teams and personnel.
In fact, the reporter who stumbled upon the images was actually Googling for news and images pertaining to a separate Navy SEAL unit, Team Seven, now being investigated on charges they abused a prisoner who later died.
The title of this post is a running joke between myself and a friend, but actually this ain’t so damn funny, is it? Because before Abu Ghraib dropped off the radar (to the monotonous chanting of “support our troops!”), a fair number of “133t” Washington flacks dismissed it as an isolated incident perpetrated by an obscure, poorly trained unit.
Not so isolated now, is it?. Not so poorly trained, are they?
I had noticed, in that vague not-noticing way, that there seemed to be a strip of green grass showing in the back yard, right along the drainage line when I glanced out the kitchen window this morning. It was ruler-straight, which I assumed was because it followed the line of drainage. Water, least resistance, and so on. About half an hour ago, after a half-day off spent blogging and so on in the Lair o’ Computers, I again looked out the kitchen window and noticed that there are tire tracks visible in the bare strip of lawn (in this area, it’s called a swale). So out we went all hotfoot, cameras in hand.
Music cue: Who Are You?/The Who
Ah, the joys of home ownership in Burbclavia; the young people have evolved uniquely suburban methods of entertainment-as-vandalism. What we have here is a kid or two on an ATV: they drove it straight in off the neighbor’s driveway, right up to the star magnolia (which never thrives, owing to its position in a low spot).
Thank GOD I procrastinated on having the rain garden put in!! They would have driven right through $800-1600 worth of labor and plantings.
I think the first order of business in the spring is a nice, strong, tall wooden fence. Every time we get snow, I can see just how many people are cutting through the yard, and today it looks like a herd of caribou went through on their annual migration to the Yukon.
And then maybe get around to the rain garden to solve the drainage problem.
Meanwhile, we called the cops and filed a report – the officer was here in less than 15 minutes, so it must be a really slow day back at the shop. David took pictures of the tracks before the light went… no other physical evidence, no cigarette butts to send to Trace, no bodily fluids glowing in ghastly UV blue. So if they catch the perp doing this somewhere else, we’ll have the goods to charge the bastid(s).
What a great news day. NPR reports that the new Secretary of Scariness, Bernard Kerik, had a troubled start in life and was reportedly a young tough or bully before turning his life around via martial arts and becoming a tough crimefighter. Just reading the fawning reviews at Amazon of his autobiography gives me the willies. He was a colorful beat cop only 20 years ago, with “little formal education.”
And now he’s the scariest Department of Homeland Scariness commissioner we’ve ever had (admittedly, not far to go there).
Guess this means the “Untitled Bernard Kerik Movie Project” will shortly be greenlighted – to “Threat Level Low.”
Thank goodness the fine news analysts at The Onion report that Iraq has adopted its very own, very colorful Terror Alert System. No word yet on what friendly puppet characters from Iraqi folklore might be assigned to each color.
Via A Cry For Help. “I can’t believe this show’s even still on.” Heh. Dude, the ratings suck, but they keep renewing it. At least they keep switching out the cast (ginmar‘s got less than 80 days left now).
We’re a nation of violent lawless gun-crazy psychos, that’s why. And we’re the leaders of the Free World.
The news story reads like a classic British police-procedural crime novel, except more violent than most (more in the tradition of P.D. James). An ordinary American ex-Marine with a shady past is pulled over in a routine traffic stop, and shoots the police officers, killing one point-blank as he plead for his life. A second officer was saved when a shot meant for him hit his radio instead.
It happened in Leeds on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas, and a family holiday in Britain). Leeds is a nice city in the north of England – David and I flew from there to Glasgow on the September trip.
If this had happened in the States, it would be covered by local news. In Britain, it’s national news.
Tuesday night as I left work, it was raining, then it was sleeting, then it started snowing. I toddled off late to
choir practice and found the usual suspects had only just arrived; my favorite two British choir ladies (they are sisters) were dressed in identical lavender sprigged jumpers (translation: flowered pullovers in a thermal knit). Yes, winter has officially arrived, as my ladies are very particular in matters of dress. Had it been snowing any harder, they wouldn’t have been there. They are darlings.
The next morning when I went to work, the snow had thawed, then frozen solid as a sheet of glass in the parking lot. If I’d had ice skates I might have made better time getting from the car to the front door of the building. I guess whoever their plowing/salt truck contractor was fell down on the job or was running behind. I was really worried about a fall and considered calling the building’s safety office to complain.
Well, they must have gotten a boatload of calls from people yelling about the ice rink conditions in the lot, because when I left that day, they’d laid down some salt (not sodium chloride, something a little less damaging to the pavement and environment). Then yesterday morning, they laid down a few more loads of the stuff. This morning when I got in, the entire surface was solid, glistening white crystals. It’s a Winter Safety Wonderland.