don’t sing at me, that’s all I ask

Posted on Sunday, 2003 February 02 by Anton

AnyBirthday will tell you my birthdate and zipcode as of 1983, if you know how I spelled my name in those days. Should I be disturbed?

Posted in general | Leave a comment

here’s Cal Worthington . . .

Posted on Sunday, 2003 February 02 by Anton

Fascinating article. Boston Globe Online / Health | Science / A mystery in black and white

Charles Darwin wrote: “Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears.” Not just dog breeds, but goat, llama, rabbit and even cat breeds sport flopped-over ears. Ears are just the start. The large black-and-white patches typical of dairy cows and pinto horses, not to mention dogs, cats, and rabbits, do not exist in their wild counterparts. And domestic animals characteristically have smaller heads, teeth, and horns, and go into heat more frequently.

What is remarkable about these differences is that they are so universal. The same traits are common to species as different as cats from cows, rabbits from dogs.

While the old explanation has been to say that people wanted these different traits and selectively bred for them (Who wouldn’t want a bull with shorter horns?), the global nature of the changes casts some doubt. To that, add this: No wild animals exhibit these traits. How would people even think to want pintos when there weren’t any spotted horses around in the first place?

Cited by Rand Simberg.

Posted in sciences | 1 Comment

meet Alec Rawls

Posted on Saturday, 2003 February 01 by Anton

An Un-republican Form of Government

In 1987, the California Sheriffs Association sponsored a bill in the state legislature to ban its electoral competition. Since then, only current or recent members of the law enforcement establishment have been allowed to run for Sheriff in California.
. . .
It is as if prosecutors had banned their main electoral opposition by getting the legislature to pass a law against defense attorneys running for District Attorney, requiring all candidates to be members of the prosecutor’s office. Somebody ought to sue.

That somebody is me.

There is much else of interest.

Posted in constitution | Leave a comment

meet Madhu Kurup

Posted on Saturday, 2003 February 01 by Anton

Thursday I had dinner with Madhu Kurup at Amarin, a Thai restaurant in Mountain View which neither of us had tried before; he didn’t comment on his, but my dish (spicy chicken with cashews) was quite satisfactory.

If you read his flattery of me, remember that it takes two to make lively conversation.

I found his Livejournal (incidentally he looks nothing like the photograph) indirectly: my log shows hits from four ‘friends’ pages which carried his report. It’s a bit of a shock to dip into foreigners’ informal writings in English but peppered with strange words; it makes me worry that my own writing might be made unnecessarily obscure by local jargon. What is the right balance? Does anyone whose English is weak read my site?

I took Madhu’s suggestion to try Google Sets on my favorite music. I found that it helps to pre-filter my entries; if the initial set is too diverse, the narrow result is nothing and the broad result is effectively useless.

Posted in California, humanities, me!me!me! | Leave a comment

meet Mary Rosh

Posted on Saturday, 2003 February 01 by Anton

Oh dear: John Lott, scholar-darling of the Gun Lobby, may be dirty. (Julian Sanchez of Cato broke the story.) I hope the Gun Lobby (statist-speak for all of us who don’t buy the victim-punishing dogma of Feinstein, Schumer, Brady et al.) will have the sense to disown him if necessary. On the other hand, of course, despite the ‘Mary Rosh’ affair I hope the sunlight will ultimately show his work to be clean.

The worst outcome of this matter – coming on the heels of the Bellesiles scandal – would be to discourage serious social scientists from looking at gun issues, leaving nothing but a war of slogans.

Posted in humanities, politics, weapons | Leave a comment

where did you go?

Posted on Friday, 2003 January 31 by Anton

Traffic here declined slightly from December (4402 visits, 19910 hits) to January (4175 visits, 17380 hits). I’d like to think that’s because I added robots.txt to keep the search-engines out of non-content pages like the stats; but hits on the current blog declined from 1649 to 1264. “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m gonna go eat worms.” Too bad I can’t ask my ex-readers why. But I write this blog for myself, and not because I starve for attention, right?

Posted in me!me!me! | Leave a comment

our man in Vegas

Posted on Friday, 2003 January 31 by Anton

Ah! Backwoods Home Magazine carries Vin Suprynowicz‘s columns. (His free mailing-list stopped some time ago, and the archives on my links page are no longer updated.) Unfortunately BHM’s archive only goes back to December 12.

Later: Whups, a bit of searching reveals that the LVRJ (Vin’s home base) has a similarly short archive. And Lew Rockwell has other writings by Vin.

Posted in general | Leave a comment