this and that

I’m sneezing up a storm today, and the good old allergy pill hasn’t helped. I do hope it’s not the same virus that afflicted my housemate for two weeks last month.

Who is the center of the movie universe? Kevin Bacon is not even in the top thousand. Rod Steiger has the lowest total path length. But would the result be different if actors were weighted by some measure of prominence (e.g. number of credits)?

It’s annoying to find a crank on our side. Rex Curry has for some time been documenting the sordid history of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and bully for him; but lately he’s gone a bit nuts in his efforts to demonstrate that the Nazi swastika stands for Socialism, frequently citing sources that, like this, show the word Sieg or Sieg-rune (symbol of victory, appropriate to any flavor of statism) but not Sozialismus; and here he reads a scribbled Adolf as another S-rune (standing for Sozialist, since no other German word begins with S) despite the wiggly remnants of the original letters and the cross-stroke of the f. Rex, a few pieces of unambiguous evidence – which are probably somewhere in among the chaff – would be far more effective than this farrago.

I lived in Los Angeles for three years without ever knowing how to get to the Hollywood Sign. And speaking of views from on high, every time I fly to Chicago (come to think of it, the last time was quite a few years ago) I look for Fermilab, but I’ve never spotted a buffalo.

Aaron Krowne should stick to mathematics rather than writing absurdities like this:

The H1-B program has allowed companies hiring software engineers to pay less for more engineers by running to the government for help.

As if there were no migration in a state of nature! It would be more accurate to say that the Immigration Acts (in which you’ll find the H-1B program) allow skilled natives to get paid more by running to the government to restrict supply. This incidentally reduces the wages of similar workers in other countries, giving foreign employers a price advantage (to the extent that their products are able to enter the market).

Posted in cinema, history, me!me!me!, race | 1 Comment

items from elsewhere

Ron Paul’s remarks on the war, to the House

useful spam-handling plugin for WordPress 1.5

a gag about clashing jargons

Sheldon Richman on the “Minuteman Project”:

. . . this “citizens’ neighborhood watch along our border” looks for foreigners who, by and large, are seeking better, more-productive lives for themselves and their children. The self-appointed American border guards inform the authorities when they find any. This strikes me as most out of keeping with the heritage of a country born in revolution, devoted to individual freedom, and skeptical of political power. The irony is that these Americans claim to be acting in the tradition of the original Minutemen, those brave early Americans who were always ready to engage the British forces during the struggle for independence.

Posted in blogdom, cartoons, humanities, race, security theater | Leave a comment

il n’y a pas d’heure pour les braves!

First day on a new assignment. I set my cheap Chinese alarm clock for 7:00 a.m. Awakened by daylight, I see that the clock says 8:08, and briefly panic; then turn on my telephone, which says 6:29. Evidently the clock zeroed itself about the time I turned in — I must have bumped it in an inappropriate way.

My housemate works near a Sears, and promises to find me a better clock today. But wait, Sears is now K mart . . .

Later: I got one at IKEA. (How do they pronounce that in Sweden, anyway?) It’s made in China but it’s mechanical rather than electronic.

Later still: . . . and it won’t ring without a nudge. Fortunately I woke up at half past six every day this week.

Posted in me!me!me! | 2 Comments

number nerdery

The expansion of the universe manifests in odd ways.

From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979):

. . . two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand, seven hundred and nine [276709 = 17·41·397] to one against.

By a totally staggering coincidence, that is also the telephone number of an Islington flat . . .

I’m fairly sure that the number in the recent movie had more digits than that, beginning with 20, which since 2000 April 22 is the code for greater London.

Posted in general | 2 Comments

unAmerican

Movielens invites you to rate movies you’ve seen and offers recommendations according to your ratings. To my amusement, most of the top fifteen titles suggested to me are foreign: six Japanese (all by Miyazaki), four Chinese and one German.

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gravitas

I called a locksmith today and he said he recognized my voice’s “heavy tone” from a previous job. I wonder whether that’s a translation of a Chinese idiom. Perhaps my voice was gravelly, as it sometimes is in the early morning.

I sing baritone, and that word comes from Greek bary- ‘heavy’, though you’d think the metaphor would apply better to a basso profondo.

Posted in language, me!me!me!, music+verse | 1 Comment

“I am damn unsatisfied . . .”

Novel digital effects (interesting though somewhat crude by current standards) and slapstick mitigate the pointlessness of Kung Fu Hustle but detract from the fight scenes. Would I like it better if I understood the language?

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