Yesterday I relayed a message from the local humane society, which contained an email address and a phone number; and the first response I got was “Is she on Facebook?”

Phooey.

Apparently it’s no longer possible to delete my Facebook account. If I deactivate it,

Your 12 friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you.

Bruce will miss you
Vanessa will miss you
Mae will miss you
Steve will miss you
Laurel will miss you

Laurel and Vanessa are dead, and Mae left Facebook long ago, which is why I didn’t bother defriending them when I did most everyone else. Bruce and Steve know how to reach me otherwise.

A recent fad in spam is Star Trek filler:

Sisko swiveled toward his chief engineer. “What do you think? Is there anybody still aboard the cargo shuttle?”
The commander nodded grudgingly. “Yes, I know. But you thought they might steal a couple of pods off the station. This is bigger than that. What did those Klingon renegades get out of it? Not the antimatter. So we have to assume that they were paid for their participation.”
Epilogue
“No!” she shouted.
The planet was a bit closer now, a bit more fiery at the edges, but it remained dark and essentially featureless. Picard peered at it as if he could have spotted the Mendel just by looking hard enough- as if he could have outdone the Enterprise’s vast array of instruments, not to mention Troi’s considerable abilities, by determination alone.

I wonder what’s the source.

Roderick Long defines right-conflationism as defending existing economic structures as if they were outcomes of a genuinely free market (what Kevin Carson calls vulgar libertarianism), and left-conflationism as using those outcomes to attack the concept of free markets. I hope my paraphrasing doesn’t offend either of them.

Left-conflationism asks us to believe that Big Business, through its corrupt control of legislatures, prevents political interference in the market and goes no further; that mere market freedom allows it to loot us so thoroughly that it does not seek subsidies or protection from competition.

The blog “Degrees of Freedom”, which had been inactive for some time when last I looked at it, has vanished. James, do you still visit here?

I’ve been getting comments like this: ( . . more . . )

An argument is offered that New Zealand is the wrong place to film Tolkien’s works:

One of Tolkien’s great accomplishments was making Middle-earth seem vividly old. Wherever the reader looks, ruins and crumbling statues poke through the lichen. […]

To do justice to Tolkien—to capture the essence of Middle-earth—a filmmaker needs to convey that sensibility. And the problem with New Zealand is that it is decidedly young—both geologically and as a place inhabited by people. […]

The criticism of tone is valid, but on the other hand: our world is, by definition, older than Bilbo’s; Tolkien had no grasp of geology anyway; Eriador has been depopulated (why?) for a thousand years by Bilbo’s time, and Rhovanion always was relatively empty.

In MacBSD, the command cal 9 1752 shows the shortening of that month in the British Empire. If I reinstall MacOS and choose Italian as its default language, will the shift show up instead in October 1582?