Asparagus pee, Gooblek & Other Neat stuff

I was listening to Bush’s RNC acceptance speech the other night, and I couldn’t help thinking that the big multi-purpose question for almost every issue Dubya touched on is, “So who picks up the tab?”

As I listened to his aw-shucks good-ol’-boy rhetoric, I found myself getting sucked into the cesspool-like vortex of the swirling promise pit and thinking, well, if it really were possible to fight active wars on multiple fronts that were moral and necessary; simultaneously cutting taxes while not raising deficits, sacrificing education, or exacerbating the gap between rich and poor; and we could make sure that Social Security and Medicare were going to be around for the people that were promised them, without cutting benefits; and the next generation (i.e., me) really could bank their retirements in a private investment with a better guaranteed return without leaving an umpteen-billion dollar hole in the existing programs; well, hell, yeah, I’d vote for this guy – but it’s all a not-very-well-woven fabric of lies, and I’d like to know who’s getting the payoff, and who’s really picking up the tab?

Them beautiful sheeps’s got the stink of wolf all over ’em, and we can’t afford to be na&#239ve. It’s not too late to register and vote. I would say, “for anybody but Bush,” but you really do need to vote for Kerry. You do the math.

Another era has come to an end.

Last night while I was grocery shopping, I happened to look closely at an endcap display of Coppertone™ products, and I noticed that the Coppertone Girl&reg has lost her tan line. That’s right, that’s what I said, she’s got no freakin’ tan line. I guess Coppertone decided that it was just not PC to have a tan line on their marketing mascot in the new era of SPF 150. I’m sure the sunblock line has been outselling the tanning lotions, so I guess they’re just showing good fiscal responsibility. But still…

In breaking news, a study in Exeter, England has confirmed something that I’ve suspected all along: you can do math problems faster and better if you memorize your times tables.

Alas, I did not bring this task to its full fruition, and even though I got a “C” or better up through Differential Equations, to this day I get really fuzzy in the 7-8-9 region of the multiplication problem space. Which reminds me of one of my favorite jokes:

Q: Why was six afraid of seven?

A: Because seven ate nine.

Well, that’s too bad… the Genesis probe has crash landed in the desert because its parachute failed to open. But then again, it’s amazing that we try to do some of this stuff at all.

Genesis : Search for Origins | JPL | NASA

It appears that Mr. Bush has taken back the only reasonable thing he’s said in recent memory, that he didn’t think you could win a war on terror.

“Terrorism” is a process, an attitude, a verb &#151 it’s not a sovereign entity or a specific person.

Yes, you can and should make it more difficult for things like 9/11 to happen, and we need to capture Osama, but all it takes is a handful of crazy individuals to slip through the cracks.

Didn’t we learn anything from the Vietnam guerrillas? How can you stop individuals like snipers from taking pot-shots opportunistically using massive organized force?

To mix metaphors, there will always be bad apples with sour grapes. How can going over unilaterally and blowing up stuff in their countries of origin at incredible cost in dollars, lives, and international opinion possibly help? It’s all about people, ideas, and money &#151 let’s use them wisely.

The best article I’ve seen on the guy with the new jawbone is Jaw transplant allows man to chew after nine years – New Scientist, but this one has a picture.

Here’s a good article on the language of politics: Linguistics prof. George Lakoff dissects the “war on terror” and other conservative catchphrases.

There was a cartoon in the Auburn Journal a few days ago, and I believe there is a tiny but exciting little caricature of me in it.

Over at MoveOn, they’ve got a pretty good new ad about “True Republican Values”. Check it out.

I stayed up late to watch a very cool show on PBS – it was conductor Michael Tilson Thomas going through the details of how the San Francisco Symphony prepares to play a piece like Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony. When he talks about his feelings on how certain passages should be interpretted, the passion he feels for the music is awesome and obvious.

I’ve always liked that piece, and I’ve had a soft spot for MTT ever since I saw him conduct when I was a student 22 years ago at Iowa State – I think he was with the Los Angeles Symphony back then.

They’re playing the show again this afternoon at 4:00, so we’re taping it. You can find out all about it here: Great Performances . Keeping Score: MTT on Music – there’s a well done Flash presentation there as well that’s worth playing with that includes an interactive score of one of the movements.