Lighten up, Francis.
Just got back from Walt’s, who had a party for our friend Kim who just finished a degree.
Got a solid face wash from Lily and Rosie, so apparently they are not mad at me for cheating on them with the other dogs at the party.
So I got that going for me.
My old CO from when I was in the 11th ACR just sent me this pic of us on the tank in Kuwait sometime in 1991:
I’m the skinny blonde covered in filth (basically, sand and dust sticking to oil and hydraulic fluid). Tank maintenance sucked. Especially in the desert, because if you forgot to put your gloves on and reached for a tool you would burn your hand.
Since everything I know about ‘America’s sport’ at the amateur level I learned from Japanese anime, I’m assuming the gormless dude in the back row who slept through the whole production is the catcher.
What’s on the agenda for a feels-like-summer weekend evening?
Sometimes the Invisible Hand just cold snuffs out yer candle.
In other news, I took my dogs for a walk this morning. Like the good neighbor that I am, I tucked a plastic grocery bag in my pocket so that if one of the dogs took a dump along the way, I could whisk the turds away. Leave only footprints—that’s my motto.
Sure enough, Daisy Mayhem took a gigantic dump on someone’s lawn, which I scooped into the bag and tied off, and we went on our merry way. It’s trash day, which means there are bins along the edges of the lawns. One was open, so I tossed the turd-bag into it.
My husband thinks this is really rude, but I don’t see the problem. I wouldn’t throw un-bagged dog turds into someone’s trash can, but bagged turds—what’s the issue? I don’t get it.
Anyhoo, away we went, but then Daisy Mayhem decided to take ANOTHER ginormous dump—right on someone’s goddamned driveway! This never happens, so I had not prepared for the eventuality of needing TWO bags. (The other dog, Patsy, never shits outside our yard.)
It was very early, just past dawn. No one else was around. I could have easily just kept going and left that pile of turds right where they were. But I wasn’t raised that way, so I was desperately trying to come up with a solution. Should I just take the dogs home and come back in my car to clean up the mess? Root through some stranger’s trash can to find a receptacle for the shit?
There was a bagged newspaper in the driveway. It wasn’t the paid subscription paper but one of those freebies. I skinned the bag off it and used it to pick up the turds, tied off the bag and deposited the bag and the paper in a nearby bin, hoping the homeowners weren’t peering through a window or on their way outside to confront me.
Did I do the right thing? I don’t know. I hope I don’t encounter any more serious and troubling moral quandaries this weekend.
What are y’all up to?
Soooo…. I was looking at Lily today, as I often do, sitting there making eye contact as she tries to give me a little face wash, and I thought to myself, I’ve only had her going on three years, and the vet said she was 4-5 when I got her, so that should make her 7-8 years old by now. But for some reason, she seems to be graying, and I had the horrible fear that maybe she was 10-11 when I got her and she is older than I think, and I will only have her in my life for a couple more years. What will I do? How will I go on? How will I sleep, since I can’t sleep unless I feel her next to my torso in between my right arm? Oh, good grief. What if Rosie is only 6 and Lily is 12? I won’t be able to handle that. So here is a picture of her the day I got her:
Now here is a pic from two minutes ago:
Her face sure looks a lot whiter and grayer to me, doesn’t it?
And just so we are clear, that’s right, folks. You are watching this happen live. I am no longer content to limit my hypochondriacal behavior to myself (I coughed- LUNG CANCER. I have a spot of the trots- COLON CANCER. I have a sore throat- THROAT CANCER.). Nope. No sirree. We’re branching out and including the pets.
But she does look grayer, doesn’t she?
Oh, and for those of you wondering about Tunch, here he is inspecting a computer I was working on earlier:
I need to be on valium or something.
The Atlantic, an increasingly-less-paper-based publication, felt it worthwhile to pay Stephen Marche to ask the question “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”. A nuggest from within Marche’s article:
Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click communication”—the lazy click of a like. “People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” Burke tells me… Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says…
Or, since you’re not on Facebook at this very instant, you could have a “semi-public conversation” right here, by commenting. Because John Cole and the rest of us are toiling away to give you all a chance to reduce your general blogospheric loneliness, at no charge to you. (You’re welcome.) Cole might even be reducing his own chances of becoming the next Zuckerberg, if Joel Johnson is correct that “Comments are Bad Business for Online Media“:
There was a time a few years ago on the early-blog-era internet [when] “community” basically meant cultivating a healthy cadre of regular commenters, the better to have a sort of virtual street team to share your stories with friends via email or IM or–in decreasingly rare cases for a couple of years–their own blogs. Social media in all its incarnations, from Facebook to Tumblr, has largely obviated that part of comments: most people on the internet are sharing content just fine…But in conversations I’ve had with peers in the internet publishing world lately, as well as a resurgence of chatter about comments both online and in schmoozy-cocktail-space, I’m starting to come to a conclusion: comments are more trouble than they are literally, financially worth…
... I’ve had two separate discussions with friends who run mid-sized internet properties–we’re talking high hundreds of thousands to millions of unique users a month–and they’ve both recently completed heavy analysis on their traffic and come to the somewhat shocking conclusion that the people who actually read comments are a small fraction of one percent of their entire readership.
I’m not talking about people who comment, which is an even smaller percentage. I’m talking about people who read comments, the supposed traffic-and-revenue generating nebulous “community” that supports nascent internet media publications and make all that engineering and moderator staffing worthwhile. Less than a percent. And if you measure the number of people who actually scroll to the end of a post and read all the comments, it’s even less.
Of course, Joel Johnson does this for a living, and his Gizmodo experience may have soured him on the whole concept of ‘commentors’. I can look at the sitemeter here and see that Balloon Juice is drawing about 2 million “visits” per month, and I can estimate that I recognize somewhere around 200 names for people who comment on a more-or-less regular basis. So if Johnson’s metrics are correct then presumably almost everybody who reads the comments here also joins the conversation, eventually. Which I’m gonna assume says something positive about the level of involvement here. But is it cause or effect that most of us front-pagers are people Cole “recruited” (or “promoted”) from the comments?
Just had a ton of soil delivered- a mixture of topsoil, Dr. Earth, and compost for my raised bed gardens. I tell you, I really had no idea how much of an undertaking this would be. I opted for four 4’x8’ eight inch tall cedar beds delivered (I went with these guys, because they seemed like good family folks running an honest small business), and I really underestimated how much earth it would take to fill them. It’s also turning into a much more expensive initial outlay than I thought. Hopefully on Sunday, I will assemble all the beds, and since my back yard is not completely even, I bought some stakes to put in the ground to level the beds.
It’s fun, though, and something you really only need to do once. My compost pile will supply all future soil, I know I have non-toxic wood and good organic soil, there will be no fungicides or pesticides, and it should last forever. Plus, since I don’t play sports anymore, this is the kind of activity that gives me an excuse to work up a sweat and spend some quality time outdoors with the girls. Also, I just really like the idea of a neat, orderly garden, as opposed to the sprawling disaster I have had the past two years.
And now… Diablo III.
There are so many reasons to love West Virginia, but here is one that just stands out above many of the rest- IT’S BEAUTIFUL!
All the farmers are doing their first cut of the year, so the air is crisp and clean and smells like fresh cut grasses (although the later cuts smell sweeter), the sky is blue, everything is a lush green, and the cows are lying under the shade tree biding their time.
I always seem to end up going to lots of weddings in the summer, so what are the best songs about weddings? I’ll go with $1000 Wedding, because I put it in all my lists, Dead Flowers. I also sort of like that awful Maria’s Wedding song from the 90s—“Just the thought of you takin’ your clothes off for that jerk, oh, it got me drinking”, doesn’t get more Irish than that. Anything else?
Update. Also too, Let’s Get Married of course.
Via Charles Mudede at Seattle’s Stranger, the Verge says there’s an upgrade in the works for every paranoid conspiracist’s tinfoil hat:
French researchers have developed wallpaper that’s designed to trap Wi-Fi signals, without interfering with radio or cellphone signals. It uses conductive ink containing silver crystals to to block a Wi-Fi router’s operating frequencies: your router should work as expected, but the signal won’t travel beyond the wallpaper’s boundaries. While currently only a prototype, researchers at the Grenoble Institute of Technology hope to make the wallpaper commercially available early next year.
Of course, once they figure out that ‘Grenoble’ is not the place where Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor cavorted, those Heartland Americans™ might reject it. But perhaps the Romneybot 2012 could work some of its Vietnam-era missionary contacts and procure an early-adopter supply to help avoid embarrassing episodes of signal glitches like this one:
And more wine foil art!
Previous wine foil art here. I’m gonna have to start a Tumblr page for that. I may be the finest (only) wine foil artist on the planet today. (I just know someone is going to burst my bubble by linking to wine foil masterpieces produced by others…)
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
For those who haven’t had a chance to scan comments today, commentor Yutsano made it through his (disc) surgery well enough that he’s back in the threads already. May your progress continue smoothly, Y!
And for something completely different, commentor Chyron HR had an idea:
I just realized—there is a non-zero probability of Romney picking a VP and then changing his mind afterward. How glorious would that be?
Apart from happy news & glorious speculation, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
How many eggs does a mammal have to lay to get some attention around here?
Those damn platypodes always hog the puggle limelight. As commenter jl notes, someone needs to speak up for the echidna, the forgotten monotreme.
But he is still with us, you know. Those who have touched us never really leave us. He was like a priest or a Boy Scout leader that way.
We’ll keep Yutsano in our thoughts for his surgery tomorrow, and congratulations to J.W. Hammer on the engagement!
And I just remembered my own news—I’m a finalist for a new position in the Regional Operations Center at work, that would be a grade increase to GS-12 and possibly a shift differential if I get selected for the night shift. I’m getting a little old for the night shift, but it’s a 10% differential, and 4×10hr shifts with three days off per week, so I could live with it for a while anyway.
(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
Dave Weigel at Slate brings news from the Heartland (Institute):
On Friday, the libertarian, Chicago-based Heartland Institute made a routine-sounding announcement. It would “spin off its insurance research project effective May 31.” The D.C.-based Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate would break off; its director, Eli Lehrer, would found some new project…Today, the spin-off—dubbed the R Street Institute—sent out a statement from its spokesman, R.J. Lehmann. Most of it was boilerplate about how the team of six Heartland refugees would keep working on “much the same portfolio of issues we already have been.” Oh, one caveat:
There is one thing that will certainly change from ending our association with Heartland: R Street will not promote climate change skepticism.The backstory is explained here by Lucia Graves. Heartland has been a locus of climate change skepticism for some time. It had been shedding some corporate support since debuting a billboard with a picture of the Unabomber and the slogan “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Next week, Heartland will host its 7th climate change conference—typically, a haven for skeptics.
“Our project has never been engaged in climate science, per se, and there are no plans to begin working on that issue now,” said Lehmann. “However, we do work on catastrophe risk issues, and to the extent that climate risk is relevant to that topic, our intent is to take scientific consensus seriously, in advocating for public policy issues that relate to climate risk.”
An example? “Global warming is relevant to the risk of catastrophic floods,” said Lehmann. “It is relevant to crop losses from drought, and we see scientific consensus as suggesting those concerns must be taken seriously as we evaluate federal subsidies for flood insurance and crop insurance.”
[My emphases.] Shorter R Street: Look, denying reality was fine as long as our funders were paying us more than we’d lose when the digestive byproduct hit the fan. But we can’t afford to base insurance calculations on wishful thinking—we’re operating as libertarians, for pete’s sake!
Apart from noting the gradual trickle towards the final stage of Gandhi’s Aphorism (First they ignore you; then they mock you; eventually they fight you; then you win), what’s on the agenda for the evening?
