Silflay Hraka

audblog audio post

Link via The Red Sugar Muse. You can make yours here.

Now, play “spot the Easter Egg.”

A Scottish couple had just gotten engaged, and the young woman was complaining to her fiance about the paltry size of her engagement ring.

The young Scotsman looked at her and said “What are you complaining about lassie, you picked it out yourself. It’s not my fault you dinna know how to work the wee crane!”

Beer of the night, and another repeat. No new beer until after Scotty arrives. No, we’re not naming him Scotty. If I was going to be that geeky, he’d be named Sulu.

I’m sure the other Treks are nice…well, not Voyager, but the only series I’ve wanted to see since Next Generation was one with Sulu as captain of the Excalibur. That was the logical next series. Still not too late, and Takei is still around. Surely he can be made to look the correct age, right? Like I care. Put him up there, liver spots and all, I’ll watch.

So, no Trek name for the kid. Scotty just feels right for his blog name. I thought about Ngnewt (pronounced ‘Noot’), but Ngnat and Ngnewt seemed a little…cutesy. Also Ripley.

Not much left of the day to chew over; just look below if you want to know why, but I did run across a song that’s appropriate for the beer of the night, The Old Dun Cow, by D.C. resident Seamus Kennedy.

Some friends and I in a public house
Was playin’ dominoes one night
When into the pub the barman came
His face all a chalky white.
“What’s up”, says Brown, “Have you seen a ghost,
Or have you seen your Aunt Mariah?”
“Me Aunt Mariah be buggered!”, says he,
“The bloody pub’s on fire!”

“ON fire?” says Brown, “What a bit of luck.
Everybody follow me.
And it’s down to the cellar
If the fire’s not there
Then we’ll have a rare old spree.”
So we all went down after good old Brown
The booze we could not miss
And we hadn’t been there five minutes or more
Till we were all half pissed.

And there was Brown upside down
Licking up the whiskey off the floor.
“Booze, booze!” The firemen cried
As they came knockin’ on the door
Don’t let ‘em in till it’s all mopped up
And somebody shouted MacIntyre! MACINTYRE!
And we all got blue-blind paralytic drunk
When the Old Dun Cow caught fire.

Then, Smith went over to the port wine tub
And gave it just a few hard knocks
Started takin’ off his pantaloons
Likewise his shoes and socks.
“Hold on, ” says Brown, “We can’t have that
You can’t do that in here.
Don’t go washin’ your trotters in the port wine tub
When we’ve got all this light beer.”

And there was Brown upside down
Licking up the whiskey off the floor.
“Booze, booze!” The firemen cried
As they came knockin’ on the door
Don’t let ‘em in till it’s all mopped up
And somebody shouted MacIntyre! MACINTYRE!
And we all got blue-blind paralytic drunk
When the Old Dun Cow caught fire.

Just then there came an awful crash
Half the bloody roof gave way.
We were drowned in the firemen’s hose
Till we were going to stay
So we got some tacks and our old wet slacks
And nailed ourselves inside
And we sat swallowing pints of stout
Till we were bleary-eyed…..

And there was Brown upside down
Licking up the whiskey off the floor.
“Booze, booze!” The firemen cried
As they came knockin’ on the door
Don’t let ‘em in till it’s all mopped up
And somebody shouted MacIntyre! MACINTYRE!
And we all got blue-blind paralytic drunk
When the Old Dun Cow caught fire.

Nothing like a Celt when it comes to song about alcohol. I think it was the “blue-blind paralytic drunk” that really grabbed me. “MacIntyre!” is rhyming slang for Fire, or so Google informs me. If you know of an alternate explanation, let me know, though I suspect Celtic music fans are few an farther between, now.

If you Kazaa Seamus, Monkey Farts is worth the download, and Mom’s Lullaby is also supposedly very good, though I’ve yet to find it, myself.

And yes, I checked the Apple store. I think they define themselves by only offering music I don’t want to buy.

Friend of Hraka Omnibus Bill on achieving racial diversity without using racial quotas, and why U. of Michigan lawyers who argued in front of the Supreme Court could face disbarment.

The website for the No-Contact jacket claims that “According to the Bureau of Justice three out of four women in the United States will be victims of one violent crime during their lifetime.”.

Shocking statistics indeed, except that the only place one can find this particular information on the web is at the website for the No-Contact Jacket, or at sites linking to it. One would think that such a horrific level of violence would be a bit more thoroughly documented, especially at, say the Bureau of Justice’s Violent crime rates by gender of victim page.

But let’s give the fine people at No-Contact Jackets a break. After all, they’re in the business of selling electric shock jackets to protect women from the numberless hordes, not statistics, even if one of them does go to MIT.

Put simply, if you were to grab a woman wearing a No-Contact jacket, you would get the shock of your life. There’s a story and associated video on the jacket here. What the story doesn’t talk about, and what the No-Contact site conveniently leaves out of its description of the jacket, is the recharge time on a electrical jacket powered by a 9-volt battery. As the video makes clear, the shock delivered to a potential attacker is annoying rather than incapacitating. What’s going to stop him from coming right back for more?

Or, worse, what if the attacker is already prepared for the jacket? Is it possible to drain the charge, say with an insulated screwdriver? What if he’s wearing rubber gloves?

I don’t know enough about modern ammunition to be sure, but what if instead of grabbing a woman the attacker just sticks a gun in her back? Is the charge enough to set off the powder in a cartridge, thus firing the gun? What happens if it’s raining? Can the jacket even be worn in the rain? Could the charge be transferred back to the woman if both she and an attacker were standing in the same puddle of water? Certainly weather-related enquiries are logical when it comes to electrical jackets, yet the answers to them are not to be found.

To be fair to the No-Contact site, it does specify that the jacket is only meant to “provide a critical life saving option for escape.”, not to protect a woman from all the vagaries and vagrants of life. You’d think something as simple as whether or not the jacket could be worn in the rain would be somewhere on the site. It is critical information, after all.

And that’s where the site falls short again. Not only is there no critical information, there’s not really that much useful information at all. How many people do you think will buy a No-Contact based on the conductive path diagram?

That’s failing grades in statistics, logic and marketing for the No-Contact people. Nice idea, crappy execution. I think I’ll wait a few developmental generations before buying one for the women in my life.

It’s been a good day to work from home. Just got this announcement from work

Sensors have detected water underneath the Phillips machine room floor, near the Intel Hell area. We are working to unclog a drain, and remove excess water.

I fixed a few errors in the sentences above. The initial statement had much more of a “Aliens crawling towards us in the duct work” feel. Note that whomever was typing it still felt they had time enough for a dig at Intel/Microsoft. It’s the little touches that count.

It also turns out that the buildup wasn’t water, but raw sewage that started to build up after the ever present construction workers managed to block up an outside drain. It was up to an inch deep in places under the raised floor of the machine before the blockage was finally removed.

Christine Todd Whitman talks about George Bush’s policies on global warming and carbon dioxide emissions.

Whitman, who said her decision to leave was for personal reasons, voiced frustration over how the United States pulled out of the international Kyoto treaty on global warming and said an about-turn on cutting carbon dioxide emissions had also harmed Bush’s image at home and abroad.

“I think the two combined have hurt him unfairly. I think there’s a very good case for both,” Whitman said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show.

In the initial context of the story, it appears as if Whitman is claiming that there are good cases to be made for global warming and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. If so, then their impact on the Bush administration cannot possibly be described as “unfair.” Quite the opposite, in fact.

But in fact it appears that she is saying that there is a good case to be made for the administration’s decisions on those matters, and the unfairness of it all is in the world’s reaction to that case, even though neither she nor the administration even attempted to make it.

“We should have laid out the fact that we weren’t walking away from a commitment to addressing climate change because the administration is not. We are doing an awful lot that most people don’t know about,” Whitman said.

Whitman said the reversal was based on the fact that Bush realized a “hard carbon cap” would have caused a shift to more oil and gas usage and resulted in either more oil imports or greater exploitation.

And we all know that there’s nothing George W. hates more that a possible shift to more oil and gas usage.

If there’s no case to be made in favor of the Bush administration’s environmental policies, then the world’s reaction to them can hardly be described as unfair. If there is a case to be made, yet it is not made, then “unfair” is still not the correct descriptive term.

The correct term is “inept”, and it should be used often, especially when describing Ms. Whitman’s two years in office.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not Anika Sorenstam played in this week’s golf tournament or not. If she can, then fine, let her. I also understand that not everybody on the tour is pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars and that she took somebody’s spot by being allowed into the tournament. If I was that guy, I guess I would have a problem with it. But I am somewhat surprised at Vijay’s reaction to the whole thing. I’m not surprised that he stated that she shouldn’t be allowed to play, or that he hoped she would miss the cut. Instead I am surprised that he decided not to participate in the event at all. He said that it had nothing to do with Sorenstam’s playing in the event, but I have serious doubts about it.

It just seems a bit too perfect that he would have scheduling conflicts this week, after he had already accepted an invitation to play in the tournament. Honestly, I doubt that Anika could beat him in a 4 day event, but perhaps he felt the pressure of being compared to her on EVERY single hole would be more than he could stand. No doubt, these two would have their scorecards lined up beside each other every day of the tournament, and if she performs well and at least makes the cut, he might be forced to remove his foot from his mouth (more so than he has already done in his backpeddling) in front of millions.

Instead of having to do this, Vijay did what any self-respecting man would do when faced with being beaten by a female…………..he took his balls and went home.

Anika Sorenstam: Three strokes off the lead with six holes to go in her first round at the Colonial.

Update: Scoreboard here.

photo via yahoo
?So this is the manling,? said Kaa. ?Very soft is his skin, and he is not so unlike the Bandar-log. Have a care, manling, that I do not mistake thee for a monkey some twilight when I have newly changed my coat.?