Day: December 15, 2004

This is Mt. St Helens, from a LIDAR image. That’s a truckload of magma every second, folks. The dome is moving up very slowly and smoothly, but what goes up eventually comes down. An explosion or periclastic event is now unlikely, but a dome collapse (god help ya if you’re flying downwind) is probably in the cards sometime over the next 5 – 10 years. At that point all of the ice still on and in the crater will abrumptly melt (sp deliberate) and you’ll get a column of superheated steam and ash about 15K meters high.

So the other day Katie comes in singing, to the the tune of the Colonel Bogie March:

Scrotum

It is a piece of skin

Scrotum

It keeps your testes in

Scrotum

Don’t overload ’em!

Or you’ll explode ’em

And then you’ll

have none.

The sheer grandeur, elegance and poetry of this brought tears to my eyes. I mean, compared to gangsta rap. If you think this poem is disgusting and stupid and jejune, get the heck off my website and scrape your eyeballs against something else. Katie was surprised to learn that the girl had never heard an earlier version of this….The one that starts with Hitler, has only got one ball… etc. So she shared that. Cultural history as transmitted by teenaged girls. Sigh.

Pic is random.

pic is something random. My fan community sez MORE PICTURES. I am but the hopeless slave of my fans.

I hear Ayurvedic medicine has heavy metals in it. I’m going to withhold judgement until I see who funded the research.

The second or third year I was on line I was the recipient of a many times forwarded flaming email. The person accused of malfeasance and rishathra (good luck following the reference if you’re not an SF fan) had his email address cheerfully provided in the hopes we’d all pick on somebody we didn’t have to face. So I emailed him and said, seeing as how you are person in a position of responsibility, why don’t I let you tell your side of the story?

The result was an impassioned, cogent and grateful description of how he had attempted to discipline a student for various infractions with respect to class time behaviour – and this of course was at the university level – and this flame war, which had drawn emails from as far away as Japan – had been the result.

Entertained and somewhat abashed, I reread the original email. I emailed the prof back and told him to keep on trucking.

Not everything that has a typo in it is a lie. Not everything that’s printed on glossy paper is the truth. Everybody, including me, has an agenda. However, for reasons that make life easier, I prefer to keep my agenda in view. Items slide off, and ooze back on but I try.

Speaking of hidden agendas, which we weren’t, if anybody has the time to follow the rawstory.com story about the guy who wrote the principal of a Southern Christian school about the slavery pamphlet used as curriculum please do so. You will see elements of my earlier anecdote. Anybody who wants to suggest what SHOULD have been said in the response letter instead can write me. I have my ideas, starting with staying civil. Sheesh. Leftists are always looking for places to dump their bile, and really, the best place is private conversation. Civility, when people aren’t shooting at you, is the only way to go. Hey, I was SERIOUS about a Unitarian gun club… who’s with me?

I’m up to my freaking armpits in Buffy.

I light a candle for all the men and women involuntarily part of the global sex trade, most specifically the ones held in the US and Canada and Israel, which are, after all, democracies with functioning police forces. So far. Check out stories about the Israeli slave-sex trade on the internet. Gave me a completely different view of the world.