babbling blue

I’ve started a lengthy post on some of the political bullshit that is going on right now, but there is so much to talk about, and I ran out of time. I’ll probably finish it eventually. In the mean time, I’m in a bad mood so here are some rants to tide you over:

No Pack, No! The Green Bay Packers blew another game last night. I attempted to watch it, but I gave up at the end of the third quarter. I’m just not masochistic enough for that. I wasn’t really expecting a win (the last Green Bay coach to win in Philadelphia was Vince Lombardi) but it would have been a nice surprise. Or even, you know, getting a touchdown.

I’m going to the Packer game next Sunday, where I expect them to get flattened by the Rams.

Imperfect Storm It stormed like crazy last night. And I know I’m in the minority here, but I don’t care: I fucking hate storms. Call me a pussy if you want (but if you do I might punch you) but they’ve always scared me. Bleh.

National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Ratzer said that wind gusts of up to 65 m.p.h. were reported, as well as widespread hail, but that flooding was the biggest issue with up to 4 inches of rain falling in places.
…
The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation said the storms damaged 827 trees, 106 traffic lights, 46 light poles and caused 56 downed power lines.

People, storms are not “beautiful”, they break things!

Fuck you, CTA! I had to wait almost half an hour for a bus this morning. On a good day, that’s about how long my entire commute takes. Three buses went past that were too packed with people to get on, and they were pretty far apart. Then finally four all come together! I was able to get on the first of those, but it quickly filled to capacity and people at subsequent stops couldn’t get on it. The train was very full too, but there was no way I was going to wait any more so I forced my way in. Of course this happens on the first time in months I decided to take my laptop home from work. And that thing is HEAVY. I think my shoulder might need physical therapy. The only good thing was that it wasn’t raining this morning.

Family stuff When I go to Wisconsin for the Packer Game, I’m going up early to see my grandpa. He’s been put in a nursing home but my family is trying to get him back home. He’s considered terminal now, so it’s really just about making him comfortable for the little him he has left. It’s scary to see him so weak and sad. He’s always been the strongest person I knew. He could do anything he put his mind to, and I always thought he was too stubborn to die until he was good and ready. But his sickness has taken away the fire, and it’s like he’s not the same person any more. It’s sad.

If you like Battlestar Galactica and the Simpsons (if you don’t you should) you’ll love these pictures of the BSG cast if they were on the Simpsons. Go see them all!

Just a quick glance at some of the day’s top stories:

At Least 12 Shot at Montreal College

A gunman in a black trench coat opened fire Wednesday in the cafeteria of a Montreal college and wounded at least 12 people - six critically - before shooting himself, witnesses and authorities said.

Fortunately as of now, none of the victims have died.

Update: Sadly, a victim has died. The count is up to “at least 19″ wounded, and they are now reporting that the assailant was shot and killed by police, rather than shooting himself.

65 Tortured Bodies Found Around Baghdad

The leader of Iraq’s biggest Sunni Arab group demanded Wednesday that the beleaguered Shiite-led government take steps to disarm militias after police said the bodies of 65 tortured men were dumped in and around Baghdad.

On a violent day even by the standards of Baghdad, car bombs, mortars and other attacks also killed at least 39 people and wounded dozens. Two U.S. soldiers also were killed, one in enemy action in restive Anbar province on Monday and the other in a roadside bombing south of Baghdad on Tuesday, the U.S. military command said.

Limits to Surveillance Bill Blocked

Senate Republicans blocked Democratic attempts to rein in President Bush’s domestic wiretapping program Wednesday, endorsing a White House-supported bill that would give the controversial surveillance legal status.
…
Republicans defeated several Democratic amendments, including measures to insert a one-year expiration date into the bill and require the National Security Agency to report more often to Congress on the standards for its domestic surveillance program.
…
But Republicans countered that the bill represented the best deal on the matter and should not be amended.

And with all that depressing news, I’d like to end this post on a lighter note:

Australian Man Probed Over Viagra Spam

Now that I have your attention, I’m going to talk about. . . sex.

People frequently and incorrectly refer to horny men (I mean really horny men) as nymphomaniacs. This is wrong since a nymphomaniac is, by definition, a female. According to our good friend Mr. Webster, nymphomania is “excessive sexual desire by a female”. This makes particular sense when you consider that nymphae is Latin meaning “inner lips of the vulva”.

You’re probably wondering what you should be calling all those slutty friends of yours. While there are many things you could probably call them (and be correct), there is a male equivalent of nymphomania. Some would say the male equivalent is simply “being a guy” but that’s not it. The term is satyriasis. A man with this condition would be called a satyr. This isn’t frequently used terminology, but I think it should be. I’m a firm believer in using the right word for the write porpoise. So next time a buddy of yours takes a trick home from the bar and then returns later that night to pick up another one, don’t call him a nympho. Call him a satyr.

You may also be tired of calling your friends lushes, drunks, alcoholics or alkies. I know I am! So to shake things up a bit, try one of these alternatives: dipsomaniac, sot, tippler or souse.

This has been your English lesson for today. I now return you to your regularly scheduled quest for porn.

As a follow-up to the previous post on crazy Mormon pedophile polygamist, Warren Jeffs:

He was caught.

I like to drink pickle juice. Not a lot, and not often. But a few sips now and then. It’s tastey! Who’s with me on that?

Big news! Pluto is no longer a planet. Forget what you learned in elementary school, as our solar system now has only 8 planets. Can you name them? Can you name them in order? (I could name them, but probably not in order.)

Anyway, astronomers got together to argue and fight and came up with a new definition of what constitutes a planet.

a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Pluto doesn’t make the cut because it has an oblong orbit that overlaps with Neptune’s. But Pluto does still have a status…

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of “dwarf planets,” similar to what long have been termed “minor planets.” The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun - “small solar system bodies,” a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.

In case you don’t think astronomers have a sense of humor, I submit this as proof that you’re wrong:

Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings - urged those who might be “quite disappointed” to look on the bright side.

“It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called ‘planet’ under which the dwarf planets exist,” she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

(full story)

Some doctor is claiming that as many as 40% of World of Warcraft (WoW) players are addicted. I’m sure a lot of people are, but that number seems blown way out of proportion. Am I addicted? Eh, who can say? I haven’t played for the last couple nights, but I’ve thought about it. During the day I’ll occassionally read message boards about it. Does that make me addicted? I don’t know.

I think online addiction is real and MMORPG addiction is just a subset.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go click Refresh on the WoW board now…

I’m not the only one that talks about underwear on his blog. Some famous people do as well. Like Scott Adams, recently-married creator of Dilbert.

Now sometimes a pair of briefs – for reasons I cannot understand – have the most annoying characteristic you could ever imagine: In the course of normal walking and sitting, the wearer’s weinershnitzel ends up poking halfway through the flap hole like a turtle coming out of its shell. And before long, the most sensitive part of your body is wedged between your briefs and the harsh denim material of your pants.

I actually have some briefs like this. In fact, I’m wearing a pair of them today! Currently all bits & pieces are properly tucked away, but that could change at any time.

It’s nice to see someone as accomplished as Mr. Adams has the same problem as we regular people. I won’t quote his entire write-up here, but it’s worth a read (as are most of his blog posts). So go read it.

For historical purposes, my earlier underwear-themed blog posts:
First Second

What does Congress really “care” about? Some political scientists tried to answer that question, using some rather innovative means. They have data-mined the text (over 70 million words in over 70,000 documents) of the Congressional Record.

The Congressional Record contains verbatim transcripts of all speeches on the floor of the House and the Senate. The team tried to determine the hot topics in Congress, and how they change over time, based on how much they are talked about. What’s so special about that?

What’s exciting about this project and others like it is that computers are at last capable of unsupervised, dynamic analysis, and they can produce meaningful results with little or no intervention (humans will still be required to interpret the results, of course). The researchers in this project turned their software loose on 70 million words of Congressional debate without doing any initial topic coding.

The computer was able to group speeches into topics, even when those speeches did not feature certain usual keywords. In one example, a speech that contained the words “terrorism,” “medical,” and “psychological” was correctly lumped in with other education speeches, even though it contained terms not normally found in an education speech (traditional searches would fail at this test). Once the computer has done its statistical analysis and grouped speeches into topic clusters, researchers then looked at a few speeches from each cluster and assigned a name to it (”education” or “terrorism,” for instance). Once that was done, interesting questions could be answered.

Among their findings is that talk about “judicial nominations” increased steadily from 1997 to 2004 whereas attention to “abortion” has decreased, going from about 5% of floor time in the 105th Congress to 1% in the 108th (we’re currently in the 109th).

I haven’t read the report, but it looks interesting. It’s definitely not light reading, though. . . much of the math is beyond what I can follow. Still, being the computer geek that I am, I think this is pretty cool.