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Author Archives: wellsdc
The latest from Setec Astronomy
First off, if you get the Setec Astronomy reference, you get automatic admission to my Geek Hall of Fame.
Chatterbox has the latest on the oft-amusing way the internet has of keeping people in the public eye from re-writing recent history–currently Repubs trying, for whatever reason, to scrub the ignominious history of pushing “voter fraud” memes.
In a recent Slate column, I noted the strange demise of the American Center for Voting Rights, an organization that sprouted up in the last few years to push the “voter fraud is a big problem” line at government hearings, conferences, and, most importantly, in the courts to defend strict new voter-ID laws. The brains behind ACVR is a St. Louis lawyer, Mark “Thor” Hearne, who has worked for the Bush-Cheney campaign and other Republican candidates for years. Oddly, the organization suddenly disbanded recently and yanked its Web site. Even more strangely, Hearne’s résumé at his law firm, Lathrop and Gage, was scrubbed of references to ACVR. Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine and blogs like the Brad Blog, much of ACVR’s material still remains available, however. You just can’t erase stuff put out in cyberspace very easily.
But Hearne apparently wasn’t satisfied with just cleansing his résumé. Despite the Slate article and follow-up NPR, National Journal, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles on Hearne, ACVR, and his possible connection to the U.S. attorneys’ scandal, someone is working hard to scrub Hearne’s paper trail. And now somebody is going into Hearne’s Wikipedia entry and trying to cleanse it of references to ACVR. (Just about anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, though the organizers have some methods of quality control.) Moreover, someone’s been trying to clean up Wikipedia’s entry on ACVR itself.
Who would do such a thing? Wikipedia keeps records of the user IDs or IP addresses of whoever changes its pages, and it turns out, astonishingly, that this cleansing was done by someone at one of the IP addresses of Hearne’s law firm.
Get it through your heads, folks, if you ever say something and it winds up on the internet, it is there forever, somewhere. Even if there’s a massive EMP in the stratosphere that fries all electronic circuits in the world, somewhere out there, there is a shielded box contained a flash drive with the MPEG of you lip-synching Clay Aiken. You can’t hide.
Today’s inexplicably e-mailed video
Received this today via e-mail, for reasons unknown.
Hey, remember when "bad" actually meant "good"?
I just forced myself to actually sit through the MTV Movie Awards, thinking there would be some funny movie spoofs, like in past years. Instead, I basically got a 2+ hour commercial for “Transformers: The Less-Animated Movie than the 1985 version (hopefully with less cheesy music).”
Leaving aside how sucky the Transformers movie is likely to be (although there’s at least one scene I’m enjoying) and how excited I nevertheless am to see it despite the massive cultural guilt trip I will doubtless go through 10 seconds after the movie ends, I have a question about something Shia LaBoof (not even gonna try to spell it) said when accepting some award: “The movie’s gonna be sick.”
I guess I’m showing my un-hip age, but why is “sick” a good thing? For me it conjures images of phlegm and vomit, among other things. The Wiktionary entry for the word really didn’t help much, as it gave one possible definition as “(slang: excellent): cool, rad, wicked.”
Have I finally been completely passsed over by the younger generation (I’m 32, which ain’t that old), such that I will no longer be able to understand anything said by anyone born after, say, 1980? Or is something more sinister at work here???
Today in strange tattoos
I have occasionally entertained a bizarre urge to get another tattoo, but this makes me doubt I could ever come up with anything cool enough (via strangemaps):
“I wanted something unique, something nobody else had. But every idea I had – it had already been done,” says Britta Oelschlaeger. The 33-year-old photographer, who hails from the city of Hannover, knew she wanted a large tattoo on her back. Eschewing more popular designs as elves, dragons, dolphins and roses, she looked for ten years until she found this 1896 map of her hometown. “I’m a fan of Hannover’s football team and I’m completely crazy about maps,” the artist explained her choice of tattoo.
It took the tattooist 7 hours to etch the outlines of that late 19th-century city plan on her back, and it will take many more to etch in the various hues of brown and green to give it the exact look as the original map. According to the AP press report, Oelschlaeger’s daughter is absolutely thrilled with her mom’s cool and original tattoo. Hannover is the capital city of Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s constituent Länder. 1896 happens to be the founding year of Hannover 96, Oelschlaeger’s favourite football club.
Catz r fun!
My new sanctum
The real agenda of "pro-lifers"
I once used this as a hypothetical of what might occur if “pro-lifers” get their way, and now it’s apparently real. From Pandagon, a woman in Pittsburgh has been charged with concealing the death of a child for not seeking medical treatment for a miscarriage (she was about 4 months along when the miscarriage occurred). The ME determined that the fetus died of natural causes.
The statute involved here requires concealment “so that it may not come to light, whether it was born dead or alive or whether it [the child] was murdered or not.” Note the use of the pronoun “it.” The statute clearly requires a birth. Generally speaking, a miscarriage is not considered a birth.
This is not about protection of life, it is about control of women, period.
Repackaging shit as gourmet chocolate
Via Salon’s War Room:
“At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [9/11 ], and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country.” — Arkansas Republican Party chairman Dennis Milligan, who tells the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, coming to us by way of BuzzFlash, that he stands “150 percent” behind George W. Bush on Iraq.
Let me get this straight…more attacks on American soil will increase our understanding of what a good job the President has done, uh, protecting us from terrorism???
Phrased more simply, a flagrant failure to protect us will make us appreciate how he has protected us???
Are we living in a nuthouse???
The best book on global warming that wasn’t actually about global warming
Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov–both a short story (1941) and a novel written with Robert Silverberg (1990).
I cannot speak to Asimov’s original motivation in writing the short story in 1941, but the plot certainly seems relevant today in many ways: A group of scientists make discoveries strongly suggesting an impending global cataclysm, which much of society rejects. In this case, a planet lit by six separate suns, whose people have never known a moment of Darkness, faces an eclipse (during a period where only one sun is visible) by a heretofore-unseen moon, leaving half of the planet in total darkness for about fifteen minutes. During this time, the stars finally become visible for the first time in recorded history. For people who have an instinctive fear of any sort of darkness, this cause widespread insanity and the breakdown of civilization. A religious cult preaches that the Stars are divine punishment for the sins of humanity and predicts the End of the World. In desperation to get some source, any source of light, panicked humans set fire to the cities. It turns out that this is a repeating cycle: the same eclipse occurs every 2,049 years, with approximately the same results each time.
Luckily, we are not headed for any comparable conflagration anytime too soon, but these stories are some interesting food for thought.