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Blogwafffe is proud to introduce a hot, new and huge catchy hook: ‘Ask Dr. Language Person‘.

With a monicker shamelessly ripped from Dave Barry, a real live professional linguist will be receiving any linguistic or otherwise language oriented questions posted at sprachwaffe. So ask away. Keep them clean, though; it is my dad.

Our cable broadband service died yesterday around 2pm. So to the both of you that read this outside of my apartment and couldn’t find it yesterday, I apologize. That’s what you get for looking at a site hosted from some dude’s apartment.

But, man, I almost didn’t make it. How did I survive the entire year last year without internet access in my apartment? It boggles the mind and defies reason.

But we’re back now (though Paul.za and Greg don’t know yet). Until charter decides to freak out again.

We totally need a satellite feed. Or some backbone.

I know no one else cares, but my server is now running WordPress 1.3-alpha-5. A developer would surely disagree, but the code seems fairly stable (as in “not about to self immolate”, not as in “no longer changing”), so I think things should all theoretically work. On my end, though, I’m not 100% sure I’ve got all my bits in place, so let me know if something explodes.

Perhaps I was a bit offensive. Certainly not my intention. I thought it moste amusing. Our Mr. Harris was meant to take it good naturedly, but if he’s suffered for it, I apologize. As well to the people at blogcoven for possibly driving away a perfectly good (as in entertaining) reader. I suppose I should have at least waited until someone else had posted. But I couldn’t resist. “Huge, catchy hooks”. It’s now my new catch phrase. If he comes back, I’ll give him a hearty *slap* on the back.

Handel’s, but still good.

The concert (only half of which was half of Handel’s piece) was a joint effort between four Caltech groups: the Chamber Singers (or thereabouts, I’ve left the program in my car), the Men’s Glee Club, the Women’s Glee Club and the Chamber Orchestra (in order of appearance). I should preface any further thoughts by noting that I had… not terribly high expectations. Caltech is a small place and so doesn’t have a large talent pool from which to fish. Also, we’re a skosh on the technical end of things; people talk about correlations between scientifically|mathematically minded people and musically minded people, but just because a person has the interest or the knowledge, doesn’t mean that person has the skill or the artistry. Violinists are the stereotypical exception. If you find a scientist or a mathematician who plays violin, chances are he|she is pretty good.

But on to the show. There were no seats left when we arrived. Paul.za and I found Katie and Ted and decided to sit on the hall steps where we could still hear (and to a great extent see) the ongoings. I ditched them, however, when I learned Michelle was sitting by herself (in a seat!) and that her neighbor had left. But, seriously. On to the show.

Read more…

and tell them they’re a bunch of douche-bags.

Both networks refused [Reuters] to air advertisements by the United Church of Christ [Flash warning] welcoming homosexuals to their church and congregations. The ads show bouncers refusing entrance to two men holding hands at an unnamed church and proclaims, “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” Last spring, these ads drew no complaints when aired in primarily republican test markets, but now (post cracker-assed-america ’04), the two networks find the ads too controversial to put over the airwaves.

In a written statement to the church, CBS, a unit of Viacom, said the fact that the Bush administration had proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman made the advertisement “unacceptable for broadcast.”

WHAT? Are they out of their festering minds? The commercials welcomes people to a place of worship. They don’t even mention marriage! And are you, CBS, really allowing your policy to be set by the current administration’s platform? Not law, not even policy, but PLATFORM. Well you can take that plank and shove it up your namby-pamby, homophobic rectum. Your actions are unacceptable and downright disgusting.

And what did NBC have to say for themselves?

NBC said the ad violated a long-standing policy of the network not to allow commercials that dealt with issues of public controversy.

Props for being a little less evil than CBS, NBC, but come on, you’ve never aired any controversial ads? Or perhaps your definition of “long-standing” is “since 11/2/04”, because I’d say just about any political ad deals with issues of “public controversy”. Nuts to you too, NBC.

ABC, at least is not such demon spawn. They’ve aired the ad, and even interviewed Robert Chase, the church’s communications director, about the situation on Good Morning America. Though, the the cynic in me says, “only because they get a chance to jab the other networks”. Well, I don’t care. Good on ya’, ABC, even if your track record is… interesting.

And people complain about the liberal media.

I have been admonished for having a slow site. I don’t access it much from outside my apartment, so I was unaware of the annoyance. I knew that the photos were slow to load; I’ve been thinking about preloading them ahead of time, but I’m not sure about the best way to do that. Photos may just have to be slow.

The more important issue is the images loaded in my css. They take too long. I’ve been thinking about reworking the style of the site, anyway. Perhaps I’ll try to get something a bit less bandwidth intensive. The real problem is that I’m doing my own hosting over a cable modem: not much uploading bandwidth. I’ll look into other possibilities, but I’m cheap.

As a stopgap, I’ll change a few links and have caltech host all my images, so at least those will load a bit faster.

I’ve also just finished importaing all my old .in need of a life. entries to this site. Many of the links are likely broken. I will not be fixing them. Deal with it.

Allen bought a condo. Well, by the time Allen is fifty-six, he’ll have bought a condo. Right now, some nice people at a bank are just letting him squat on their property.

The nice two bedroom unit is now furnished with (nearly) all of his worldly goods as well as one or two of the otherworldly ones. The new place could probably host about twenty people comfortably and sleep about ten (depending on heights and relations). Sounds like a party to me.

I went down the day after Thanksgiving to help make this all possible. We rented a fourteen foot U-Haul (driven by yours truly – I was a real long distance hauler that day – drivin’ my rig from state to state, sleepin’ in rest stops, pissin’ in bottles, eatin’ burger king, peerin’ down the tops of women in convertibles and jerkin’ off to the Celine Dion station all day long) and made two trips from Poway to South Escondido (apparently, unless you specify the quadrant, people think you live in the boonies). Many of you may know just how good at parallel parking I am. You should have seen me in the truck.

Following a hard day’s work of manual labor, we hit up the Shakespeare Pub in or around downtown San Diego. Black and Tan and Shepherd’s Pie.

A day well spent.

Reuters recently posted a story with the title, “Report: Nearly Half of HIV Adults Are Women“.

My response: “…umm… nearly half of all adults are women.” This doesn’t really mean anything, unless you think the percentage should be skewed.

The rest of the article is as poorly written. The language is ambiguous (did the number of women in East Asia jump by 56% or to 56%, and are they normalizing to total population or to total infected population?), and the writing keeps jumping back and forth from topic to topic.

I (think I) understand the issues unique to women with HIV. Indeed, they are very important issues: male dependence, oppression, abuse, cultural inequalites. The list, surely, goes on. But this article does not present those issues very well. All they’ve done is throw some big numbers around. Now, anything that gets more people aware of the AIDS crisis is a good thing, but I wouldn’t mind if those somethings contained actual information.

Old news, I know, but still of note. I was working late yesterday and so hadn’t check the news in over twenty hours. Contrary to my expectations, the world had not ended while I wasn’t there to passively check up on it, but I did still get a shock. The first headline to pop up in my RSS feed reader was “Powel Quits, Rice to be new Secretary of State“.

Noo…… The saving grace of this administration is leaving. To be replaced, yes, by the “unsticker”.

I think the Illuminati are on the upswing these days.

Anyway, thanks Secretary Powell.