If nothing else, just for the disclaimer.
(more…)

S is right. There had better be a special place in Hell reserved for this man.

As much as I like “I Think I’ll Disappear Now” I have got to change the songs in my MP3 player.

Running into you like this without warning
Is like catching a sniff of tequila in the morning
But I’ll try, I’ll try to keep my food down
That’s quite an aftertaste that you’ve left now that you’re not around

moxie
Pronunciation: ‘mäk-sE noun
1 : ENERGY, PEP
2 : COURAGE, DETERMINATION
3 : KNOW-HOW, EXPERTISE
Etymology: from Moxie, a trademark for a soft drink
m-w.com

Two excellent articles in the NY Times on American soldiers.

The first is a photo essay on battlefield medicine and the care that those soldiers who are wounded in Iraq recieve. I strongly suggest that you take the time to view the pictures.

The second article is on how creditors are treating reservists who are being placed on active duty and shipped overseas.

Though statistics are scarce, court records and interviews with military and civilian lawyers suggest that Americans heading off to war are sometimes facing distracting and demoralizing demands from financial companies trying to collect on obligations that, by law, they cannot enforce.

The article discusses the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act:

The law, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, protects all active-duty military families from foreclosures, evictions and other financial consequences of military service. The Supreme Court has ruled that its provisions must “be liberally construed to protect those who have been obliged to drop their own affairs to take up the burdens of the nation.”

I have to wonder whether those who would evict the wife of a soldier serving in Iraq, or foreclose on the house of a reservist called to active duty are the same people driving around with the “Support Our Troops” magnets on their cars.

Now Burger King does its part to further the American obesity epidemic, with a 730 calorie breakfast sandwhich.

“The critics will still label it food porn,” Sherri Daye Scott, editor at fast-food magazine QSR, told USA Today, which first reported the story. “But the average male fast-food customer does not have a problem with this.”

Guess they just want to make sure that we bring the US life expectancy back down.

Maybe it’ll be the neo-Cons and “Christian” Conservatives that’ll flock the Burger King and Hardees, and with any luck, they’ll take themselves out of the voting population early.

Congratulations to the basketball team for their win last night.

However those students who set fires and “pelted (firefighters) with bottles and cans as they tried to extinguish them“–I hope they are both arrested and expelled.

For those of you who missed the news, this is the coolest things ever.

NC State Paleontologist Discovers Soft Tissue in Dinosaur Bones

It means that maybe, one day, we really could grow a dinosaur. It means we may well learn whether dinosaurs are cold-blooded are warm blooded. What color their skin was. What their skin was like.

Of course it means that the Calvins of the world would no longer be able to imagine what dinosaurs were like.

But I can live with that.

Elephants Communication

Of course it’s well known that I think that elephants are the coolest animals ever. But the idea that elephants learn their communication opens up the possibility that we could eventually learn to communicate with elephants. Unfortunately, our track record with dolphins probably means this won’t happen any time soon.

Oddly enough I’ve been relatively silent on the Terri Schiavo case. Oddly, because end-of-life care has been a major focus of my studies.

First things first, I am morally and ethically opposed to euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. I am pro-life across the board (and in a way that the president and most conservatives most certainly are not).

I do, however, believe that what has been happening in the Terri Schiavo case is wrong. No one should be forced to live like that, when they are no longer living.

I also believe that what we should be learning from this is the importance of filling out a living will and a health care directive. If you are in WV, you can go to the WV Center for End of Life Care.

It is important, although it is very easy to put off–after all, despite all the time I have spent studying the issue, I still have not filled out the forms. But I will. This is my note to myself. It’s too important to keep putting off.

ADDENDUM the First
For some excellent posts, see:
Respectful of Otters for a medical opinion
Obsidian Wings for the opinion of a bioethicist

Electronics Recycling

Saturday, April 23, 2005
9am – 2pm

Finally! A chance to make Michael get rid of some of the computer parts that have been piling up in the basement!

Anti-government protesters have overrun the presidential palace, the White House, in Kyrgyzstan’s capital Bishkek.

This is where my cousin spent his time in the Peace Corps, until he came home this fall.

I wonder whether he is surprised by the unrest.

I’ve been thinking about desire.

Not the kind that stars in movies and advertising, but the kind that makes people go–the desire that motivates people to achieve and succeed.

I have friends who are working to achieve their desires. One wants to be a poet and author. Another wants to be a mother. A third wants to be a romance writer. They know what their goals are, and they know what they have to do to achieve their desires.

Me, I wasn’t even sure I knew what my desire truly was. What motivates me? What is it that I want more than anything else? Then I realized that I did know what my desire was, but it is both more complicated and more simple than what my friends want.

I desire knowledge.

Not an education–although that can go along with it–just knowledge. I want to know things. To learn things. Many things. All different kinds of things.

I want to know about the founding fathers of the United States. I want to know how to fence. I want to know about the beliefs of the different religions in the world. I want to know how to make plants grow better. I want to know how photosynthesis really works. I want to know how to box. I want to know words–their meanings and how they came into being and how they’re pronounced and used properly. I want to know why people do the things they do. I want to know the perfect lemon cake recipe.

There is so much out there I want to know, and yet there is so little call for such knowledge, so little use for it. No one is going to give me a job because I know some plant physiology and I know some HTML and I know the basics of ethics. There’s just no call for it–yet they are all part of my desire.

And that, more than anything else, is why I sometimes have such a hard time. There is no call for my knowledge, and no one willing to pay me solely to learn stuff.

But there should be.

I’ve been thinking about the continual claims of the religious right, that America was founded on religion, and is a religious nation, and thus Christianity should be forced upon all Americans whether they like it or not. (There’s a disgusting billboard on University Avenue that claims that those who aren’t Christians are traitor to America, which is what got me fired up on the subject.)

I’ve always thought that the founding fathers were far more tolerant than, but I never had anything to back that up. So I decided to look for a list of the US presidents (especially the early presidents) and see what religious faith they were. Needless to say, I didn’t find everything I wanted in one place, and so compiled the information into a table that suited me.

It seems to me that several of the early presidents were either deists or of a more tolerant faith than most of the religious right. I mean, you don’t see a lot of evangelical Unitarians out there.

So I continue to doubt the claims of the religious right when it comes to the First Amendment.

However, compiling the list again reminded me of how little history I know. I’ve read books on Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but I know so little about the rest of the founding fathers.

Sometimes I feel like there will never be enough time to learn everything I want to know.

Just got back from picking up my car.

I missed my car.

I decided two things. First, that I dislike Nissan Sentras, and I really dislike automatic transitions.

How can people stand to drive those things?