J-walk told me I should go look at Grow-a-Brain, and I do whatever he says, so here’s a link to a really cool page of theirs, growabrain: Beatles Archives.
This is too cool not to blog – Dialect Survey Results as a map. Do you pronounce the sound in aunt like the a in ant, the au in caught, or is it the same as ain’t?
You probably won’t believe this, but I’d love to believe that President Bush is a capable, competent representative of a powerful collective of 300,000,000 free-thinking individuals. I’m just havin’ a little trouble with that.
See, I’m not sure this man understands the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion. Some people don’t, you know.
I mean, when he asked for $87 billion, I did a quick calculation ($87,000,000,000/300,000,000) and figgerred this was about $300/head * me+my wife+my daughter, and got $900 to fund the Iraqi reconstruction. Well, OK.
So I was reading this article from some financial site like Motley Fool, and it turns out I really was confused about the distinction between the budget deficit and the national debt. See the deficit tells you the difference between what we have available to spend and what we plan to spend, and the debt tells you what we already owe our own bondholders and other nations. It’s kinda like, you know you make $35,000 a year, but you spend $37,500, which means that at the end of the year you owe $2500 on your Visa at 13.5% interest. So that year, you have a $2500 budget deficit and a $2500 debt.
But it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that if you keep this up, next year you’ll have a $2500 deficit, but a $6000 debt, and so on.
So my understanding is that we currently have about a $500 billion deficit, and a $7 trillion debt. What that means to me and my family, if I understand this at all, is that we owe somebody somewhere around $75,000, and Bush is a) cutting taxes and giving rebates, and b) asking for more spending. At least the Democrats have the god-given sense to ‘tax and spend’ instead of just spending.
For an extra-special Asparagus Pee perspective, consider this: A trillion is a million million, so if there were 7 million millionaires in America, our national debt would take all 7,000,000 of their fortunes.
Looks like our daughter is going to need some dental work, so here’s a joke I thought of earlier today: ‘Four out of five dentists recommend chewing Trident Sugarless Gum. The other guy, who has a much clearer understanding of his own business model, recommends sucking on sugar cubes.’
I don’t really think about gay marriage all that much in my day to day life, because I’m not gay, and I am married. But recently, I seem to keep butting my head against this issue wherever I turn as something that needs to be thought about. (I should probably mention that we live exactly 121 miles from San Francisco.)
I think the main problem is not the whole gay vs. straight dilemma, Christian morals, or ‘American Values,’ but rather, the fact that in our society over the last 91 years, taxes and social benefits have been deliberately structured to benefit married couples who own property and bear children.
Now, after several thousand years, marriage has a lot of baggage associated with it. I guess the bible folks still think the man and the woman cleave together to become one flesh. I think there may even be an element of ‘Adam gets his rib back,’ which neatly mirrors the ancient Greek ideas about needing both halves to make the Platonic whole, which in the vernacular becomes ‘my better half.’ (Despite the fact that Greek philosophers were generally homo-pedophiles.)
So my bottom line is, I think they’re fighting an uphill battle to call it ‘same-sex marriage’ but I believe with all my heart that serious same-sex alliances should be granted all of the rights and privileges of temporarily married wannabe breeders, or else the straights shouldn’t get any special treatment. (As long as the Government wants to reward me for gettin’ hitched, buyin’ a house, and gettin’ it on, that’s fine, but let’s spread the love, OK?)
My very best and only real friend in the world was a gay man who lived a confused life filled with shame and died of AIDS about 10 years ago, so don’t you dare even ask me about a special amendment to the constitution to document our idiocy about same-sex couples.
- Awesome Math Fun Thing
- Bush Twists Science as well as Truth
- Erik Benson (no relation) talks about Developing Reputation
- Wikipedia’s List of Lists
- On last night’s Angel, he got turned into a brooding muppet… here’s a review.
- Speaking of Angel, here’s a link to help Save Angel.
- Ever wonder what happens if you Pop a Water Balloon in Zero-G?
- Here’s a good Reference Desk portal.
- How about the smartest guy who’s ever lived?
- Awhile back, I blogged about the new Schick Quattro 4-Blade razor – Here’s The Onion’s take on Gillette’s response with a hypothetical 5-Blade Razor. (Note: contains much objectionable language)
| Well, it was bound to happen… the geniuses over at The WB have cancelled Angel. Another dark day for television, and once again, Asparagus Pee salutes Joss Whedon for the years of pleasure we’ve gotten from his immense creativity.
Whedon, ever the philosopher, quotes the poet on the subject: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN’ SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.” (via MediaSharx & The Bronze) Here’s a link to Whedonesque Weblog. |
Another nine days – where does the time go? After I griped below about my typical visitor, I got a very nice entry in my guestbook from Brian ‘Big Bri’ Lewandowski saying, ‘I read your site daily… I swear…’, which was nice, and I had someone over the weekend who spent like 50 minutes crawling around here, so I’ve decided not to give up. Brian is a stand-up comic and a published author and he has a nice blog called L’il Kernels of Insight. Here’s a link to his book Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind over on Amazon, and here’s a blog entry I like about competition and Ants in the Pants called I MUST WIN!.
By the way, my very first blog entry was February 9th, 2003, so Asparagus Pee, Gooblek & Other Neat Stuff is over a year old already!
I can’t believe it’s been over a week already since I’ve blogged, though honestly, I’d take it a lot more seriously to have 50 people a day coming here if 30 of them weren’t looking for ‘pee pictures’ and what not, or if anybody actually stayed longer than 30 seconds. (If you’re a real live regular who comes here to see what I’ve got to say, please do sign the guestbook or vote for baths vs. showers or something.)
It’s almost midnight here, so just in case I don’t get time to write about some of the things that are on my mind, I’m going to start with a long list of Linky-Doodles™:
- Dennis Miller used to be so cool – what happened?
- Spot the Fake Smiles – I got 17 out of 20, and I’m a schlemiel, a schlimazel, I’m tryin’ to say I’m a real schmuck – oh, wait, that’s right, I don’t know yiddish… I’m just a patsy. (Via The Presurfer)
- Einstein’s Theory in Words of Four Letters or Less (Via Reality Carnival)
- Did Edison really Invent the Lightbulb?
- Does this parrot really talk? (On a related note, the rumors that Churchill’s 104 year old pet parrot was still suggesting we ‘f**k the Nazis’ has since been discredited).
- Confessions of a Car Salesman.
- I’ve got a bunch of personnel stuff I’m behind on at work, and I think I really need to reread this article on How to Manage Smart People.
- One of my heroes from a long ways back is a man named Win Wenger who wrote a book on increasing your intelligence that I read back in 1980 when I was a college freshman at Iowa State. Here’s some music he’s improvised directly to tape as a creativity exercise, and I haven’t decided yet if there’s any point to it.
- Here’s an inventor who’s Imagination Engines create new inventions for him.
- Turns out there was this guy, Raymond Loewy (1929-1986) who was an incredibly influential industrial designer – cars, logos, furniture, appliances, Lucky Strikes cigarette package, Airforce One’s paint job, etc. Here’s his sketch for the Exxon logo.
OK, I promised myself that I wouldn’t blog about Janet Jackson’s half-time indiscretion, because frankly, I’m waiting for her to go full-time, but these two parodies that are going around are pretty hard to pass up – Face on Mars… Coincidence? and Amateur Gourmet’s Cupcakes.
Here’s the actual transcript of Dubya’s Meet the Press interview that everyone’s reading. It took me about 15 or 20 minutes to read it, because Bush is basically, well, I was going to say ‘incoherent,’ but I’m going to pull out all the stops and call him ‘inchoate,’ which is a word I’d hoped I’d never have to use to describe a president, so let me explain, no wait, there’s not enough time, let me sum up:
Russert: So, you’re blowing smoke about inviting a special investigation into the lack of legitimate intelligence going into the war with Iraq?
Dubya: That’s right. It turns out there was no threat, and there were no weapons, and I had no support from the international community or the UN, but let’s back up for a second – it was still the right thing to do.
Russert: Senator Kerry is promoting the idea that you weren’t a very good National Guardsman, not showing up for duty, going AWOL, etc.
Dubya: Well, I’ve destroyed or hidden all the records, so “Bring it on!”
Russert: We can’t help but notice that the economy is in the toilet and you’ve singlehandedly turned a tidy $281 billion surplus into a $521 billion deficit. The debt has gone from 5.7 trillion, to $7 trillion – up 23 percent.
Dubya: Hey, you can’t pin that on me – I was only in office 3, maybe 4 months when all that stuff started to happen, so it’s Bill’s fault. And that deficit is how us patriots fight evil the American way, so suck it up.
Russert: So no more tax cuts until we balance the budget?
Dubya: What? Are you crazy? Read my lips.
This is fun. Bartleby’s has The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy on line, and it’s searchable and browsable. Here’s the idioms page: 4. Idioms. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002
I know a lot of these, but I need a refresher on things like NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), and some of the foreign language borrowings like in vino veritas.