The Republican attack on birth control, as well as on abortion, is going strong here in the South. This recent article in the New Yorker is invaluable for you guys who don’t know the difficult history of the birth control movment, and its evolution into Planned Parenthood. this is a large pdf file, and well worth the read.
Man, sometimes I just can’t do it.
Something goes wrong, and I search the forums, and get hints like: “look at the sticky in this forum”. Big help. Or else, “What’s your configuration? Are you running linux?”. Always good to answer a question with another question.
Usuallly the problems are pretty arcane. I had an issue with vsftpd, and the only help I could find on that issue was, “Be sure your’re running version 2007, not 2.06.” I’m running version 2.02, which is the latest version available for my operating system (CentOS 6).
We attended a funeral today. I swear, I will never attend another funeral in South Carolina–unless it’s an RC mass (which might last for 20 minutes–and has nice-smelling incense). For over an hour we were harangued and preached at by two, count’em two, baptist preachers. “I’m sure everyone here is a Christian,” said one of the other speakers; I resisted jumping up and contradicting her. I attended the funeral out of respect for the deceased; I was afforded no respect. I’m not going to participate in these shams anymore.
Tags on pillows, on mattresses, on anything withf a fabric or stuffing that needs to be identified. You need to know what’s in the thing you bought, because there may be llergies involved. Okay, I get that. But that tag, that’s so ugly–why is it sewn into the seam? Sure, you don’t want it easily removed–but sewn into the seam?
I suggest all pillows, etc, be made with a matching-fabric appedndage, onto which the contents-tag can be sewn. Then you could remove the ugly white tag by snipping off the little appendage, and the remaining bit of fabric, which is sewn into the seam, is invisible.
Why do we need ear plugs?
To give ourselves a few moments of rest. To retreat from the hurley-burly of the day. To go to sleep. To meditate. To drown the roar of an airplane’s engines. To escape that most annoying noise from the TV down the hall. In short, for what we think of a privacy–to be alone with our own thoughts.
What kind of ear plugs?
The soft foam-rubber kind. E.A.R. is a favorite brand. Flents now makes an equivalant type. They must be a cylindrical. You roll them between your thumb and forefinger, then insert them into your ear beyond the outer lobe so that when they expand, the completely fill that passageway leading to the eardrum.
What’s a bad ear plug?
Any that is made of a solid material, such as wax, or rubber; the idea is to block the sound waves–a solid will conduct the sound waves.
Bad Idea: a cone-shaped foam plug. You might look at these and say, Yes, my ear passage narrows as it goes inside, so I should get an earplug to fit. But you don’t want an exact fit: you want to fill up the passageway. The foam is foam so that it can expand to fill up that space.
Doesn’t this get rather expensive?
Not at all, as the foam rubber cylinder can be laundered and re-used. Save the pairs of earplugs after you use them; when you have collected enough, put them into a bag made for delicate fabrics, and run them through the washing machine and drier. They’ll come out fresh and ready to be re-used.
My used earplugs get rather un-soft.
Soften the earplugs by hydrateing them. You can hold them in your hand for a while; you can breath on them, for a quick hydration; put them in a shirt pocket, near your skin–you are perspiring and exhaling all the time through your skin, which will soften up the foam shortly. Probably not something you want to share.
Avis and I went to see the HD showing of the Met’s production of Sigfried yesterday at a movie theater here in South Carolina. It was a small theater, with a posted capacity of 159. We arrived 10 minutes early, and were alone in the room, so we got to choose good seats, row high enough and in the center. A total of 9 people, including us, eventually attended. But what gets me is that four of those other seven decided to sit directly in front of us! Choosing from 157 other seats, they needed to clump up right by us.
This was not the first time–at the previous showing of Don Giovanni, we were also alone until five people arrived, who decided to sit right next to us, and then decided they didn’t like those seats, so they got up and moved–directly behind us! All this in an otherwise empty theater.
Via Krugman, this great comment from Rortyomb on
And then this:
Honestly, I don’t know why, and resent, the change in usage from “from …to”, (which seems to me a reasonable formulation), to “to…from”. For instance, “Usage rates have gone to 45% from 39%.” This is just backwards. You go from somewhere to somewhere. If you reverse the order, it requires the reader (or listener) to make a mental recalculation, switching direction of metaphor.
You find this all the time as a matter of style in the New York Times and in lots of other publications. It’s ugly. It’s got to go.
I’d say, “I took a train from New York to Chicago.” I would not say, “I took a train to Chicago from New York,” unless I was trying to emphasize the fact that it was a train, rather than a plane. Or that it was from New York that I took the train, and not Atlanta.
If I wanted to emphasize the starting point, I might say, “The usage rate rose to 50% from 35%, ” if 35% were a shockingly low number. But that would not be the normal case.
Language should follow the order of nature. Rivers flow from the mountains to the sea; rain falls from the sky to the ground; time’s arrow moves from the present to the future. Language must agree.
Interesting article in Wapo on separation.
Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles:
But he was equal on every side and quite without end, spherical and round, rejoicing in his circular solitude.
How he know about Chris Christie?