Author Archives: wellsdc

Stop! Grammar Time! Capital vs. Capitol

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This one is easy.

328px-Capitol_in_Austin_Texas_at_Night

The building on the left is the Texas Capitol. The city surrounding it is the Texas capital.

A capitol is a building housing a seat of government. That’s all.

Any other meaning you might intend uses the word capital, which has many definitions:

  • The most important city or town of a country or region, usually its seat of government and administrative center
  • A place associated more than any other with a specified activity or product
    • – Milan is the fashion capital of the world
  • Wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing
    • – the senior partner would provide the initial capital
    • – rates of return on invested capital were high
  • The excess of a company’s assets over its liabilities
  • People who possess wealth and use it to control a society’s economic activity, considered collectively
    • – a conflict of interest between capital and labor
  • A valuable resource of a particular kind
    • – there is insufficient investment in human capital
  • A letter of the size and form used to begin sentences and names
    • – he wrote the name in capitals

Photo credit: ‘Capitol in Austin Texas at Night’ by Eric Hunt (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

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From beneath you, it devours…

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In honor of Shark Week 2012, the good folks at Mashable have compiled a collection of GIFs highlighting the second-most-terrifying animal on earth (at least to me, and I’m damned if I’m telling you what the first one is.) Here’s my, uh, favorite:

Goblin Shark Attack

At the opposite end of the mood spectrum, we have this GIF of a goblin shark attack. However terrifying most sharks may be, they don’t generally unhinge their entire faces and eject a jaw full of barbed teeth straight into their targets. Goblin sharks, as you can see, are a little different. Their elongated snouts contain highly sensitive electromagnetic sensors, which help them find prey in the blackness of the deepest ocean bottoms, where they dwell.

This video of a goblin shark in the wild comes from the Japanese broadcast of NHK Tokushuu on Aug. 31, 2008. Uploaded to GIFBin, it’s had 198 Facebook shares and more than 14,000 stumbles, from which we can draw certain demographic conclusions about the kind of people on Facebook vs the kind on Stumbleupon

Yes, that is indeed terrifying. What do you think, Jones the cat?

alien_cat-01

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The BAMF Bichon

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402px-AG_Cody

Behind this smile, beats the heart of a BAMF

This story is why I will never make fun of the Bichon Frisé breed ever again. (Trigger warning for animal neglect, injury)

They may look small and dainty, but Sophie the Bichon Frisé proved that these dogs are powerful survivors. It is tempting to focus on the colossal failure of the human in this story, to condemn him as a fool at best or a monster at worst, to wax legalistic about how he should go to jail or never own a dog again, and so forth. I’m sure plenty of people will cover that ground, so I want to focus on Sophie, whom I shall dub the Wonderpup.

A dog that was dragged accidentally behind a truck by its owner for about a mile Sunday will recover from its injuries, officials said.

David Bolduc said that after walking Sophie, a small bichon-frisé, outside his Water Street residence, he slipped the leash over the tow hitch of his vehicle while he did a couple of tasks in his garage. When his wife called him to invite him for lunch at McDonald’s on Kennedy Memorial Drive, he got into his truck and headed off to meet her, without remembering where Sophie was.

“I just forgot about it,” a distraught Bolduc said Tuesday.

According to a report filed by Chris Martinez, animal control officer, the dog was dragged for nearly a mile before the leash came off of the tow hitch near KMD Florist and Gifts.

A little farther up the road, another motorist alerted Bolduc to what had happened, and he rushed back to recover Sophie, who was on her feet on the sidewalk, alongside the road.

The dog suffered injuries that were significant but not life-threatening, including the total loss of patches of skin on an area from its abdomen running to the chest, and on the knuckles of its front paws. The pads of all four paws also suffered injuries.

***

“I would like to commend the animal control officer for doing a fine job,” Bolduc said. “He got a hold of the veterinarian and made him open up for me.”

Sophie was admitted to the Kennebec Veterinary Services in Oakland, where Dr. Paul Smith sedated her and treated her injuries.

She remained in the veterinarian’s care until Tuesday, Bolduc said, and was responding positively to antibiotics.

Bravo to Sophie for being a seriously tough cookie. Bravo also to Dr. Paul Smith, owner of Kennebec Veterinary Services, for being available on a Sunday to treat Sophie.

It should go without saying that a dog is not like a Big Gulp that you might accidentally leave on the roof of your car. Sophie should not have had to go through that ordeal to prove how incredible she is. We can’t know what was going through Sophie’s mind, but I suspect she wanted to follow her human and tried to keep up with the truck–if she had fought the leash, her injuries might have been far, far worse. Dogs have a way of reminding us of their enduring, determined love. It’s up to us to remind our fellow humans, and ourselves, that we bear the burden of being worthy of that love.

Photo credit: ‘AG Cody’ by Rocktendo (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Defense against tyranny

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“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” –Not Thomas Jefferson (cf)

We are not supposed to talk about tragedies in anything other than the most treacly way for some undetermined period of time after they occur. I’m going to violate that unwritten rule of society today, because of something that happened yesterday, not too far from me. Some guy in College Station, Texas shot six people, killing two, before being killed by police gunfire. One of the deceased is a Brazos County constable named Brian Bachmann, who was reportedly serving eviction papers on the gunman when he opened fire from inside his house. The other victim was a 43 year-old “civilian bystander” named Chris Northcliff, who was the shooter’s landlord. You can look elsewhere for the shooter’s name. His family told the media that they knew it was just a matter of time before he snapped, but they never told authorities. He also loved guns a lot.

I am a vehement supporter of sane and reasonable gun rights. I’m not sure how many people actually want to ban all guns, but those people have zero chance of succeeding in today’s America, and that would be a terrible idea anyway. But people who advocate for unrestricted, or near-unrestricted, gun rights, have some issues to address. The right to bear arms is often cast in terms of the right to defend oneself, to defend one’s home, or as a defense against tyranny. It is entirely possible that the College Station shooter believed he was doing all three, or some combination thereof, in his possibly-warped mind (I’ll buy into this mental-health-treatment-not-gun-control argument when someone actually does something beyond talk about it). When you cast something as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, you cannot count on anyone interpreting “tyranny” the same way as you.

Police, in large part due to the First Rule of Policing, get rather wide discretion on the use of force in a specific situation. As the law currently stands, civilians do not. Whether or not this is fair is a debate that will likely rage on for years. What happened yesterday seems to be exactly what the more hardcore gun rights advocates, in promoting defense of self, home, and liberty, are talking about. It was also, by all accounts, an unspeakable crime and tragedy. See the problem?

Will College Station police now send SWAT teams to serve legal documents? It would not be unprecedented. Hopefully a revolution will not be started by gun-toting mouth breathers who can’t see past their own front door.

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Happy Left-Handers Day from an Ambidextrous Weirdo

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flandersToday, August 13, is Left-Handers Day, a day to celebrate the roughly thirteen percent of the human race that absolutely hates writing in pencil.

For some fun facts about left-handedness, read this piece on ABC’s website (so I don’t have to summarize it for you.)

Research suggests that lefties tend to be more creative, but also more prone to ADD and other mishaps. Those who know me should not be surprised by that one teensy bit.

While I write with my left hand, technically I am ambidextrous, and I have a highly random and unpredictable set of things I do left- or right-handed. I’m actually right-handed for most things. The two major things I do left-handed are writing and cooking-related activities (i.e. cutting, stirring, etc.), unless I’m using a knife and fork, in which case the fork is in my left hand. I actually have no idea how most people use cutlery. I use scissors with my right hand (which made kindergarten much easier), and I am universally right-handed in sports. Video game controllers seem to be set up to require left-handed use of the joy-/thumbstick, and that has never been a problem.

Where it gets fun is in activities where I switch hands depending on what type of device I am using. In music lessons, I have learned that I play guitar right-handed (fretting with the left hand, strumming/picking with the right), but that I play wind instruments (based on an attempt to play the recorder in elementary school) left-handed.

Having taken classes in both riflery and pistol safety, I learned that I shoot pistols right-handed, but rifles and shotguns left-handed. No one can figure that one out.

If I were capable of juggling one-handed, I just have this feeling that it would be my right hand.

Photo credit: Via leftorium.com.

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The Lesbian Cyborg Atheist Who Ran for President

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This election cycle seems to be an ever-widening circle of lies sliding along a downward spiral of deception into a morass of strained metaphors. So far, I’ve counted one possible untruth out of Harry Reid, and for Mitt Romney I stopped counting. BooMan captures the essence of why we should not feel bad for any hurt fee-fees Willard might be experiencing:

Mitt Romney isn’t really a Mormon. He’s an atheist who only went along with his father’s faith so he could duck the Vietnam draft. He didn’t actually try to convert anyone when he was in France either. In reality, he spent all his time in Monte Carlo gambling and buying high-end hookers. When his daddy found out what he was doing, he made him come home and marry his high school sweetheart. Actually, he only made him marry her after the second time she got pregnant. The first time, they got an abortion. Then Romney started using some of the mafia connections he had made in Marseilles to import heroin. By the time he became governor, they were flying it straight into a secret airport they set up in the Berkshires. When one of the pilots started to talk, Romney had him killed.

Now, if we started telling these stories to people, and a substantial percentage of the population started to actually believe these stories, and if congressmen humored and even encouraged the people who believed these stories, and if media figures talked about these stories, and if Congress actually had hearings about some of these stories, then Mitt Romney would know what it’s like to be treated like a Democrat.

(h/t DougJ at Balloon Juice)

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I’ll have my cake with some extra WTF? please

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You could call it Amelanistic Burmese Python cake, or just snake cake.

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You should probably call it whatever it wants to be called. (Cake by North Star Cakes, Kent, UK)

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This Week in WTF, August 10, 2012

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Oahu– Rep. Steve King (R-Idiocracy) found the microfiche of President Obama’s 1961 birth announcement in two Hawaiian newspapers. While he can’t deny the likely authenticity of these announcements, he also cannot rule out the possibility that he is insane (that is the only explanation I can think of for Rep. King’s subsequent wild-eyed speculation):

We went down into the Library of Congress and we found a microfiche there of two newspapers in Hawaii each of which had published the birth of Barack Obama. It would have been awfully hard to fraudulently file the birth notice of Barack Obama being born in Hawaii and get that into our public libraries and that microfiche they keep of all the newspapers published. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some other explanations on how they might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya. The list goes on.

No word yet on whether he has considered the possibility of time travel. Or space aliens. Or improbable quantum fluctuations creating Barack Obama, fully formed, from a pile of aluminum recycling.

– Fox News doesn’t think our Olympic champions are being patriotic enough, because they don’t compete decked out from head to toe in American flag regalia or something. Our athletes should do it to show how America is exceptional, and also because other nations do it, but America is still exceptional, because shut up. (If you can make it through then entire almost-5-minute clip from Fox News in the linked article, you are made of stronger stuff than I.)

– Bryan Fischer compares kidnapping children from gay or lesbian parents to freeing slaves, thus failing at both American history and basic human decency. I wish I was making this story up.

Photo credit: ‘Oahu’ by Earth Sciences and Image Analysis, NASA-Johnson Space Center [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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