Miles O'Brien on the space station

Did you know CNN's Space Correspondent is named Miles O'Brien?

Seriously. I saw him giving a report about the Space Station the other day. Am I the last person to notice this?

IKEA has a bot; her name is Anna, Anna is her name

The main thing I don't like about YouTube is that you don't get to choose the picture that represents your video. They just have a program that chooses a frame from the video and uses it as the picture that people see when they decide whether or not to watch your video. If it's a sucky frame, or a frame that reveals a surprise in the video and spoils the ending for viewers-- then tough luck.

Anyway, I made a silly parody video that you'll only understand if you're familiar with both the song "Boten Anna" and the "Ask Anna" function on IKEA's website. It would have been nicer if the picture had been one of the ones with Anna's face in them... but this is how it turned out:

Making Fiends, etc.

I'm going to start posting on a regular schedule-- every Wednesday-- and I'm going to try to have thoughtful, insightful posts every time, but today my thoughts are pretty random.

I love this site. Ah, the joy of silly Flash animations. With bizarre quirky humor. I was hooked as soon as I read the FAQ.

Poor Vendetta, reluctantly headed toward heaven on a road paved with bad intentions. She tries so hard to make Charlotte suffer, but only succeeds in amusing her.

Speaking of suffering... we all know that Disney took "The Little Mermaid"-- a Hans Christian Andersen story with a depressing ending-- and made it into a bouncy, uplifting story with a Disney Happy Ending (TM). I can't help but wonder if they can do the same to "The Little Match Girl." After all, it's a Hans Christian Andersen story with a depressing ending, too. Come on, guys! Give it a try!

Seriously. When you read a story in which the entire plot consists of a homeless child sitting outside in subzero weather, trying to sell matches, and lighting them one by one to keep warm until she runs out of matches and freezes to death-- you just have to wonder if Disney is up to the challenge.

(Aw, come on! Disney can do anything!)

In South Korea, video games pay money to YOU

Excerpt from the article:


(12-18) 04:00 PDT Seoul -- Choi Yeon-sung avoids going out most days, and when he's on the street, he puts his head down -- to dodge the whispers, the stares and the pleas for autographs.

Such are the hardships of a celebrity video game player in South Korea.


I guess it figures. All the people that we idolize-- actors, singers, sports players-- are gaining enormous fame and fortune for doing something that we all did for fun when we were kids.

I mean, as kids, most of us enjoyed singing songs. Most of us played pretend, and most of us threw a ball around from time to time. And now, as adults, we have a certain fascination for people who can take these seemingly simple activities almost to the level of an art form, doing them with such skill that they make gigantic amounts of money just from the expenditures of people who are willing to pay to see them do it.

This happens even when (as in the case of some actors) there is very little actual skill present, and the individual in question got this ridiculously high-paying job because of other traits, like inherited wealth or good looks. In some ways, this may fascinate people even more, because not only is the person making millions doing an activity that kids do for fun, but he or she is making millions without even doing this activity much better than kids do it. It's the American dream of attaining fame and fortune without any significant effort.

So it's no surprise that some country, someday, would convey this kind of celebrity status to video game players. I say it's great-- at least video game players have to have actual skill in order to achieve celebrity status.

I just wish that there were some kind of respect for people who don't do anything fun and useless for a living, and instead work long hours doing hard manual labor that benefits others in a tangible way. Why is it people like that who earn minimum wage?

The things that a backroom job does to your mind...

Days like this just leave me in awe of how many people there are in the world. Specifically, how many people there are in a big city like Minneapolis (which isn't even one of the most populous cities in the world, which boggles my mind even more).

People are buying patio furniture. A lot. At the Target store where I have my backroom job, if you just counted the number of people who came in for patio furniture and needed to have it pulled from the backroom for them-- heck, if you just counted the ones who did that during the hours I was on duty... I'm sure you'd get over a hundred so far this spring.

I can only imagine what number you'd get if you included people who bought patio furniture when I wasn't there, and people who bought patio furniture that didn't need to be pulled from the backroom, and people who bought patio furniture at other Target stores in the area, and people who bought it at other patio furniture retailers besides Target.

And yet this huge number of people is not even the majority of people in this city. I know this, because there are three situations when you buy patio furniture:

1. When you get a patio for the first time in your life, and have to buy your very first set of patio furniture. (Hasn't happened to me yet.)

2. When your old patio furniture breaks. (Also hasn't happened to me, of course.)

3. When you decide that your old patio furniture is so godawful ugly that getting new, better-looking patio furniture is worth a few hundred dollars to you. (Won't ever happen to me, but probably happens to many of the yuppies around here.)

I am willing to bet that, for the average person, quite a few years pass between these events. I doubt there are many people who buy a set of patio furniture every year, or even every two or three years. So, at any given time, the number of people currently buying patio furniture has got to be a pretty small fraction of the population.

And yet this small fraction of the population is huge. Patio sets just keep marching out the door, day after day, nonstop. I see them being bought, and I know I'm only seeing a small percentage of the ones that are being bought, and yet it seems like a staggering number to me. And not only is this staggering number only a small percentage of the patio sets being bought, but the mind-blowing number of people buying patio sets is only a small percentage of all the people in the city.

And this city is only a tiny, tiny percentage of the people in the world.

Some people look up at the stars to think about how gigantic the universe is and how small they are as individuals. I look at South Bali Gazebos and Parisienne Wrought Iron Chair and Table Sets.

Late-night thoughts

In my city, from time to time, there are billboards and signs advertising religion. Nothing flamingly fundamentalist; just things like "Teenagers, rebel! Take your parents to church!" In 1999 there was an ad campaign pointing out that "the Bible is Y2K compatible." "If the lights go out, turn to the Light of the World." Cute stuff like that.

It occurs to me that, while there seems to be a law against having religious material in a government-owned area like a courtroom, there is no law against having religious material in a government-owned area like a city street.

So I think we can quit arguing over the whole issue. If a judge wants to display the Ten Commandments, all he needs to do is rent some billboard space in front of his courthouse.

Hopefully we're not waiting on feeling nauseous

Okay, I love the ideas in the song "Waiting on the World to Change," but... the grammar in the refrain... I just couldn't help writing a parody.





Language isn't static
It changes day by day
And those changes, they're decided
By what most people say.
So when an error's really common
You can pretty much expect
That within a few years it'll be
The way that's deemed correct.

So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change
We keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

We know we can't prevent it
And that it's silly to resent it
So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

"Waiting on" means serving
That's how waiters got their name
It's not the same as "waiting for"
But it's often used the same.
If some day the dictionaries
list the two as synonyms
It just means language has evolved
To suit the public's whims.

So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change
We keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

It's not that we don't care
But it's the only option that's there
So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

"Hopefully" doesn't mean "I hope"
It means "in a hopeful way"
But some dictionaries list them both
'Cause of what most people say.
"Nauseous" means "nauseating"
It does not mean "nauseated"
But so many people said it wrong
The original meaning's faded.

So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change
We keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change

There aren't logical excuses
For objecting to new uses
So we keep waiting
Waiting
waiting for more words to change.

Some loners just write blog posts when they're angry

I hate it when someone who fits the stereotypical description of a criminal goes and commits a crime. The last thing we need is more people reinforcing stereotypes.

Today at work I heard a discussion on the radio about how we can make loners stop being loners and "become more social" so they won't commit crimes. Give me a $%@#! break.

Being a loner doesn't fricking cause violence. Yes, there are a few people who become violent because they don't like society in general, or because society in general has rejected them-- but there are millions more who just quietly cry over being lonely, and also plenty of people who actually enjoy their solitude. Trying to force them into being more social would just make them angry, and probably more likely to attack someone.

And just because someone writes violent stories (or listens to violent music, or plays violent video games) that doesn't mean he's going to be violent. You ever see Stephen King go on a psychotic killing rampage? Of all the bloody, gory, terrifying books and movies out there, how many were written by people who went on to shoot up a school? Geez.

I've been trying to convince the world of these things all my life, and now it just got twenty times harder. Thanks for nothing, VA Tech gunman.

Kira or be killed

I love Death Note. Just love it. Love the intelligent plots. The attention to the detail and complexity of the magical system in the anime. And I adore L. Absolutely adore him.

And the fact that the name "Kira" is involved is only a tiny detail. That's not why I love the show. I just made that picture for the heck of it.

Anyway, I love Death Note. Just wanted to get that out of my system. I'm going to bed now.

Tied up

Husband has to wear a tie for an interview. He went to this page for instructions.

I liked tying knots when I was a kid. I got interested. But here is my attempt at a Pratt knot:



I will never again underestimate men who have to wear ties...

I deserve to be pun-ished

I just said to a friend, "You know, so far two of the state quarters have bison on them. Now we need one that has ten eels on it, too. Then we'll have a bison-ten-eel quarter."

He said absolutely nothing. Either he doesn't know what a bicentennial quarter is, or the pun was so awful that it didn't deserve a reply.

Probably both.

*goes back to doing random useless stuff*

There is no other holiday with dates this crazy.

When is Easter? It takes a 1,248-word article to answer that question. I especially love the distinction between an "ecclesiastical" full moon and an "astronomical" full moon. Some people are verrrrrry strange...

Speaking of dates, I'm bringing oatmeal-date cookies to this year's family Easter party, in addition to oatmeal-raisin and oatmeal-chocolate-chip. I hope they turn out well. I've never made them with dates before, but I figure I need some use for the chopped dates I bought in honor of Palm Sunday.

(I also bought a coconut, which wasn't even ripe and was absolutely impossible to eat, earning me a lot of teasing from the husband, especially since Palm Sunday is named after date palms and has nothing to do with coconut palms. But I was in a silly mood. That's my excuse for most insane things I do, and it usually works well.)

Star light, star bright

I found it on the way to work a few days ago. A turquoise blue stretchy adjustable strap, with a flashy thing on it. The flashy thing is yellow, octagonal, and faceted sort of like a really cheap toy jewel.

It has a button on the back. Push the button once, and two lights inside it flash alternately. Push it twice, and both lights flash together. Push it three times, and both lights stay on and don't flash. Push it a fourth time and it turns off.

When it's on my head, or around my neck (the adjustable strap allows for either) I look like some alien babe in Star Trek. (The Original Series, of course.)

When it's over my eye, I look like some android or cyborg alien babe in Star Trek. (Still the Original Series. Back then, they were on such a low budget that something like this item might very well have been used as a costume accessory. In multiple episodes. For multiple types of alien babes. With only minor alterations. Like wearing it on the neck instead of the head.)

Wearing it drives my husband absolutely crazy. He says it is the dumbest-looking thing he has ever seen. It's become a game between us. I put it on and see how long it takes him to look up from his video game and notice. Eventually, he notices, and grabs it off my head and throws it across the room. I try to sneak over to where it is and put it back on before he notices.

*dies laughing*

Now, nothing can be done by machines

For some reason, today I've been thinking about a story one of my teachers told me once. Some young relative of his had wanted to participate in an Invention Fair, but couldn't think of a real invention, so he just put a name card next to an empty space, with "Invisible Nothing Machine" written on the card.

I can just imagine his conversation with the judges:

"What's that?"
"It's an Invisible Nothing Machine."
"What's it made out of?"
"It's made out of nothing."
"What does it do?"
"It does nothing."
"Why would we need a machine that's made out of nothing and does nothing?"
"It saves a lot of time and money. Building it requires no resources and no work, and once it's built, it saves humans from having to do nothing all by themselves."
"Hmm. He's got a point. If we had a machine to do nothing for us, we could spend more time doing something. It would greatly boost our overall productivity as a species."
"I say we give him a prize."

According to my teacher, the kid actually did get a prize. An Honorable Mention or something. I suppose that says something about the world, but I'm not sure what.

Don't ask, don't tell... doesn't work

Okay, so now the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is coming back into the public eye. Frankly, it has always annoyed me. Clinton had some good ideas, but this was not one of them. And I think that kind of policy is useless not only in the military, but also in all the other places it's put into practice.

There are various possible kinds of "don't ask, don't tell" policies... including the one that is commonly used for interviewing anyone for any job. Of course, depending on the company, this policy may or may not apply to sexual orientation, but it generally does apply to such things as ethnicity, religion, marital status and disability. Questions on such subjects are referred to as "illegal" questions, but interviewers are not technically prohibited from asking them; they are just prohibited from requiring the applicant to answer them.

On the one hand, I can see why the law tries to keep interviewers from finding out things that might cause them to discriminate against the applicant. If you want to prevent discrimination, it's not enough just to prohibit choosing applicants based on religion, ethnicity, disability, etc. For instance, if a company refuses to hire a certain applicant who is known to have a disability, there is absolutely no way to prove that they did it because of the disability. You can't prove why people did something, because that information exists only in those people's heads... and sometimes it's buried pretty deep in there. They may even have convinced themselves they're doing it for an acceptable reason. There is only one way to make sure people don't discriminate against you: Make sure they never find out that you have any traits they might discriminate against.

But sometimes that's impossible. If an applicant refuses to answer an "illegal" question, it will pretty much always be assumed that the answer is something the interviewer doesn't want to hear, and that will be taken into account when deciding whether to hire the applicant. Obviously, the system doesn't work.

One could make it a little stricter, so that interviewers could actually be punished for asking such questions-- but that still wouldn't be foolproof, because lots of applicants wouldn't even know that the questions were illegal, and if one of them did decide to charge the interviewer with asking an illegal question, it would be very difficult to prove him guilty. And, of course, if the interviewer broke the rule and asked the question, an applicant who replied "You aren't supposed to ask that" would still be assumed to be gay, disabled, of an unwanted religion, or whatever the question was about.

One could try to deal with this problem by penalizing both "asking" and "telling"... not only making it punishable for the interviewer to ask the question, but also making it punishable for the applicant to reply either yes or no. The only advantage of this: if the applicant refused to answer the question, it could be seen as an attempt to avoid committing a crime, instead of an admission that the answer would be unattractive to the interviewer.

But it would create a lot more problems. Applicants would have to be constantly on guard to avoid mentioning anything that could give the answer away, even if it were not an unattractive answer. For example, if such a policy were used in the military, a male applicant who happened to mention his wife or girlfriend at any point in the selection process would essentially be stating that he was not gay, thus violating the rule against "telling," and earning whatever punishment the law provided for that offense.

The only conclusion I can come to is that it's impossible for any kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy to work worth crap. That's why so many people can't get hired for any job-- because there's no even remotely workable way to prevent discrimination. And it's especially impossible for it to work the way it's set up in the military, where the law requires discriminating against any applicant who gives the unwanted answer.

No more Orson Scott Card

I once read a diatribe against gay marriage by the celebrated science fiction writer Orson Scott Card-- a diatribe that had a lot of big words and fancy language, trying to look intelligent, but had no real arguments. Assertions that children needed both a mother and a father, but no real explanation why.

And one overly literal interpretation of the law: "Gays already have equal marriage rights. Just like heterosexuals, they have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex." (Well, if we're going to be that sophomoric, we can even go a little further and say that men and women don't currently have equal marriage rights: unlike men, women have the right to marry men, and unlike women, men have the right to marry women. How unfair.)

But I was still able to read and enjoy his work, for the same reason I can enjoy Tom Cruise movies despite disagreeing wholeheartedly with his religious beliefs. The man does not equal the actor, and the man does not always equal the author, either. I enjoyed Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, and Shadow of the Hegemon.

Sure, he had some scattered references to "every living creature's natural desire to reproduce," and I would balk for a moment at his apparent assertion that I wasn't a living creature, but then I would ignore it and read on.

But when I got to Shadow Puppets, I drew the line.


(Spoilers beyond this point.)


Bean, the main character, because of a very disadvantageous genetic condition, has decided not to have children. His friend Petra wants to have his children, and she keeps pestering him about it.

Then, at one point, they meet a man who "has no desire for women." It is not 100% clear whether he is gay or just not interested in love and sex at all. But he clearly serves as a mouthpiece for the author.

He claims he is about to get married to a woman who already has some children of her own, and spend the rest of his life living with her and raising her children, despite having no desire for her.

And he gives them this long lecture about how the only way to feel truly fulfilled in life is to raise children together with a member of the opposite sex. They don't have to be your own children, and you don't even have to like this member of the opposite sex-- but raising children with a member of the opposite sex is the instinct that's programmed into every living creature, so if you don't do it one way or another, then you won't feel that your life was worth living.

And this convinces Bean; he gets all weepy and realizes deep in his heart that this man is right. That's where I stopped reading.

When I had read Orson Scott Card's essay on gay marriage, I had taken his comment about equal marriage rights as an over-literal interpretation of the phrase "equal rights," twisting it to fit his own views while choosing to ignore the fact that gays can't be happy being married to the opposite sex. But now I realize he's even crazier. He actually thinks gays will be happier in heterosexual marriages.

Furthermore, he thinks I am incapable of being happy in my own lifestyle-- a heterosexual marriage with no children. Never mind the fact that I panic, curl up in a ball with my hands over my ears, and rock like the stereotypical autistic, if I spend more than fifteen minutes trying to be in a position of control over a child. Never mind that screaming babies and whining toddlers make me want to physically smash something if I even overhear them in the supermarket. He actually thinks I would be happier if I were raising kids.

No more. I'm not reading his books any more. That's it.

%$@#! new Starfleet Academy movie thing

Don't mind the following, I'm just ranting about the makers of Star Trek and their evident inability to let anything rest in peace.

(To the tune of Beautiful Wreck.)

All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Of all of those shows set in the Milky Way
TOS, you're the one I wish could have stayed.

You're the one that's least sub-par
What a beautiful Trek you are
Flying star to star,
Beautiful Trek you are.

They go crazy every seven years, you know
And so every seven years they make a new Trek show.
Except for TOS, 'cause you just got three,
Which is sad, 'cause you're still the best Trek to me.

I’m still sitting here waiting by my TV set
But there's been nothing good yet
But there's been nothing good yet

You've got Spock pon farr
What a beautiful Trek you are
You've got Kolinahr
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful
A beautiful Trek you are.

All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Yeah, I like the original Trek, I do.
I like the original Trek, I do.

Yeah, you've got T'Lar
What a beautiful Trek you are

But not Tasha Yar
And not Selar
But what a beautiful Trek you are.

What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.

There are 10 kinds of dogs. Those who know binary and those who don't.

Okay, remember the first dog toy I bought at Target? The creepy eyeless pig with only one front leg and one hind leg?

Well, I've found that it's not the only totally wacko dog toy they have.

The highlight of my day today was a dog newspaper.

But the absolutely awesome thing about it isn't the fact that it's a newspaper. Or the fact that it's really just a squeaky toy in the shape of a rolled-up newspaper. It also isn't the title "Doggy News," or the slogan "All the news that's fit to chew on." Nor is it the price (two dog bones), the paw-stamp with "edition" written under it, or the headline "Man bites dog" with the corresponding illustration.

It is the fact that the newspaper is written in binary.

Think of it! Dogs can read binary! Who'd have thought it? The headline in plain alphabetical characters was just to throw off computer-illiterate humans. Your dog can spend joyful hours poring through articles that you would need a decoding program to understand. Now you know why your dog gets jealous when you pay too much attention to your computer. It's because he wants the computer all to himself!

I suppose it says a lot about me that I actually went to the trouble of transcribing all those ones and zeroes into my text editor, and then went looking for online binary-to-text translation programs. But, alas, when you paste

01110110 111011011 1101 101110 111 0110 01 01101101 110110 110110 10 011 01101110 011 111011 0110 11010 01101110 11011011 1101 0110110 11011 111011 011011101 10 0110 1101101 01101 11101 0110 1101101 11101 011011101011 1101101 01101 0110 011 0010111 110110 11101 01101 01101 0111011 011011 0110101 011

into an online decoder, you get either an error message, or a line of characters that looks like this:

I guess dogs know something that I don't.

Abby and Norma updates!

My web comic "Abby and Norma" is now in color, and it's now weekly instead of bi-weekly.

Just letting y'all know.

Even skeletons need a hug sometimes

Maybe Romeo and Juliet really did make it to Mantua before they died.

And maybe they really lived in the Neolithic era...

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