This optical illusion is supposed to determine which half of your brain is dominant. If the dancer is spinning counter-clockwise, you’re left-brained. Clockwise means you’re right-brained. I’m apparently left-brained, which is a complete blow to my carefully constructed self-image of a poetic dreamer. It turns out I’m Spock. But even Spock got lucky once in a while, so I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad.
Blogging may be light over the next couple days. I’m finally getting around to building a new computer and I found someone who wants to take my current system off my hands. But first, I have to scrub the hard drives clean and do a fresh install of Windows. My old computer is going to a nice family and I can’t risk letting the kids find my cache of granny porn. Be back soon.
The stress of political implosion must be getting to movement Republicans, because some of their recent behavior is truly bizarre. In their zeal to deflect criticism from the president’s veto of the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program, conservatives have launched a smear campaign against 12-year-old Graeme Frost and his family. Graeme earned the ire of Michelle Malkin and others on the right when he appeared on a Democratic radio address to talk about how SCHIP helped him and his family. Malkin and her associates quickly accused the family of being welfare cheats who exaggerated or lied about their finances and medical conditions. Malkin visited the parents’ home and business to snoop around for information on the family’s finances. A poster on the FreeRepublic website posted the family’s address.
Over the last few years, movement Republicans have resorted to character assassination with increasing alacrity when confronted with opposing viewpoints. They no longer seem interested in debating issues and defending their viewpoints; it’s easier to simply shut the debate down. And let’s not forget that these tactics worked, at least in the first few shellshocked years after 9/11. They successfully waged an ideological war that browbeat much of the country into political submission for the better part of four years. But the fight has made them twitchy and paranoid. In their unceasing vigil against dissent, they have lost their perspective, so much so that they feel justified in targeting a kid as “fair game“.
Conservatives like Malkin are continuing to play a game they’ve already lost, sacrificing their own decency in the process.
PZ tagged me with an interesting meme experiment. Now, pay attention:
Below are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] in [genre] is …”.
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them
in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone
extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not
viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, The 19th Floor, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
My parent is Pharyngula:
1. The best dystopian novel in SF/Fantasy is…
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2. The best romantic movie in Historical Fiction is:
A Lion in Winter
2. The best sexy song in rock is…
Raspberry Beret by Prince
3. The best spy movie in Thrillers is…
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
I’m spreading this meme to:
I know this is a little complicated, but you guys are smart or else you wouldn’t have your very own homestead on these here internets.
Congratulations to my friend Derek, who just passed the bar. There’s still the small matter of the midnight ceremony and the sacrifice of a small animal, but that’s really just a formality. I have fond memories of my own initiation. Holding the knife hilt between my teeth was tricky business, but I managed okay. Good thing I was wearing safety goggles; those arteries can be real gushers.
I’ve always had a special fondness for SF anthologies and I always make it a point to pick up the annual “Year’s Best” volume that is edited by the incomparable Gardner Dozois. In Best of the Best, Dozois assembles his picks for the best short stories from the past twenty years’ worth of the annual collections. It includes stories from genre luminaries such as Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, and Gene Wolfe. Some of my favorites from the collection are:
If you have any interest in the science fiction short story, this is a worthy addition to your collection. One might argue that Dozois excluded some classics (the omission of John Varley’s “Press Enter” is almost criminal), but anthologies such as this are inherently open to such criticism. I see that Dozois has released a sequel of sorts that collects longer novellas, which I’ll be sure to check out.
It’s October in Minnesota and I have the air conditioner running. This just feels…wrong. We Midwesterners are not immediately threatened by the consequences of global warming (unless you’re the owner of a ski resort), but the developing world has much more at stake. UN officials are already declaring that much of humanity is already confronting a “mega disaster” brought on by a record number of floods, droughts, and storms. But as long as the fallout of climate change remains largely confined to Asia and Africa, the chief emitters of CO2 will be slow to change their behavior. It is probably already too late to reverse the effects of our dependence on fossil fuels; all we can do is hope that we can mitigate the damage.
Slashdot, the esteemed website that dishes out news for nerds, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Why, it seems like just yesterday that I was browsing the site and reading foreboding predictions about Y2K and hyperbolic musings about how cool Daikatana was going to be. Is Jon Katz still writing? I used to enjoy his articles about geek culture in the aftermath of Columbine, although he could sometimes be a tad self-important.
I still check Slashdot on a daily basis and it never fails to provide regular morsels of interesting content. I’ve even been known to submit a few comments of my own. My next life goal is to submit a story that makes it to Slashdot’s front page. And if I’m really fortunate, maybe I’ll get slashdotted myself in the future.
Congratulations, recording industry executives. You just scored a $220,000 court judgment against a single mother who illegally downloaded some of your songs. You must be feeling pretty stoked right about now. Now everybody knows that they can’t mess with you. People are going to think twice the next time they’re tempted to grab the latest Kanye West single off of LimeWire. Maybe you should go out and celebrate by knocking down a couple old ladies as they’re crossing the street. Better yet, there are probably some stray puppies out there that could use a serious ass-kicking.
You should sleep soundly tonight, secure in the knowledge that the American legal system is there to watch your back.
It’s late and the blogging part of my brain is already tucking itself in and asking for a story. More tomorrow.