The Indigestible

In yet another exam­ple of the per­verse sense of humor of the uni­verse, an Indiana Wiccan stabbed her­self in the foot with a sword while con­duct­ing a good-​​luck ritual.

MSNBC shares with us the story of Katherine Gunther, of Lebanon, IN. While per­form­ing the cer­e­mony under the light of a full moon¹ in a ceme­tery — which includes, appar­ently, repeat­edly thrust­ing the point of a sword into the ground — she man­aged to spike her­self as well.

Now I sup­pose you could argue that the good luck cer­e­mony actu­ally worked, or else she’d have sev­ered her femoral artery … but maybe in the future she and her fel­low Wiccans will con­sider avail­ing them­selves of toy swords.

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1. Of course.

“Calorie Lab” is a web­site that ordi­nar­ily pub­lishes more or less use­ful com­men­tary on diets and diet plans, gen­er­ally skew­ing to the reality-​​based side, but this last week they pub­lished a very cred­u­lous workup of Stanley Burroughs and his “cleanse” diet plan here.

The arti­cle presents the diet in a more or less legit­i­mate sound­ing light until the last few grafs. That was extremely trou­bling to me, so I posted this com­ment on the article:

This sort of pseu­do­sci­en­tific mumbo-​​jumbo is not merely wrong; it’s actu­ally dangerous.

Anyone will­ing to take diet advice from a man who didn’t even acknowl­edge that germs make peo­ple sick is tread­ing a dan­ger­ous knife-​​edge of stupidity.

Please keep your arti­cles to medically-​​responsible subjects.

While the online fol­lowup from the Calorie Lab edi­tor was a bit snarky, I tried to keep it light. However, I received the fol­low­ing in my mailbox:

On Jul 17, 2008, at 9:02 AM, Mark Schrimsher wrote:

Did you actu­ally read it? We said the guy was a crank and felon, and
then hoisted him by his own petard with quotes from his nutty book.

My reply read as follows:

But the arti­cle was pre­ceded by a lengthy descrip­tion of the diet. The exco­ri­a­tion came last. It was read­able as an endorse­ment, and fol­lowup com­ments by oth­ers indi­cated a cred­u­lous accep­tance of his teachings.

Mark Schrimsher then fol­lowed up with this incred­i­ble defense:

Continue read­ing →

Or not, per­haps. Delia Derbyshire was appar­ently respon­si­ble for the mix of Ron Grainer’s Dr. Who theme in 1963, but damn, she did some other inno­v­a­tive, amaz­ing work in the ana­log era.

Hit this link and lis­ten to her piece under the ‘Timeless’ header; or just hit this.

That was last week, right?

h/​t Warren

Yes, another reply to a riposte from James Lileks of the Minnesota Star-​​Tribune. If it keeps up at this rate I might have to add another category.

Thursday he was in rare form, and opened with a nice salvo:

Another day in the Land of Inversion, where the obvi­ous is not an option. I heard more inter­views with learned politi­cians inform­ing me that “drilling for oil” will not affect any­thing, least of all the quan­tity of oil. We must appar­ently wait until 2015, when a magic engine that runs on uni­corn flat­u­lence is invented. I have to ask: why is any­one invest­ing in uni­corn flat­u­lence today, when it won’t make any dif­fer­ence for sev­eral years? The answer’s sim­ple: the engine will Appear at the cho­sen moment, borne from the clouds by star­lings, but only if we have repented of our foul ways, and the last of the sin­ners has left the cul-​​de-​​sac to reside in a home located a sus­tain­able dis­tance from his or her place of employment.

Ah, there’s noth­ing like a slice of finely-​​tuned rhetoric to start an intel­lec­tual feast. The gloss is mock­ing the belief that ter­mi­nat­ing our use of petro­leum is a myth­i­cal magic bul­let which will some­how see us into a golden age of energy inde­pen­dence — at least, in the minds of some — and his objec­tion to that idea is valid. There really are peo­ple out there today who seem to believe in magic, who seem to believe that a total shut­down of oil use in the US will lead us into a rain­bowed hori­zon of crepuscular-​​rayed efful­gence. The sug­ges­tion that any­one who thinks we might want to con­tinue work­ing with petro­chem­i­cals is essen­tially a senile fool­ish coot is a nice icing on this con­fec­tion, and is again prob­a­bly valid.

I recall that a few years ago there was a big push among the green­ish in favor of bio­fu­els. When we started using them, the response seemed to be favor­able, but no one really seemed to think about the hid­den and col­lat­eral costs. With as much as 1/​3 of the next year’s corn crop being com­mit­ted now to feed­ing trucks, we’re already feel­ing the effects of food costs ris­ing. I caught an arti­cle ear­lier this week talk­ing about how cat­fish farms in the south­ern US are clos­ing down because they can’t afford the cat­fish feed, which is appar­ently corn-​​based; that sur­prised me. I didn’t expect the reper­cus­sions to be that fast, and cer­tainly not that oblique.

Continue read­ing →

It’s sur­pris­ing some­times what you can lapse. Remember Bomb Pops? The red-​​white-​​blue multi-​​veined pop­si­cles ped­dled from the back of the ice cream truck?

Well, okay, maybe not — and this isn’t a post about child­hood nos­tal­gia nor long­ing for the Days of Old When Things Were So Much Better, gag.

Several months ago I began re-​​ripping my CDs to iTunes. I began the project partly because I had a newer iPod, and partly because the orig­i­nal rips I’d done were a sub­stan­tial com­pro­mise. I was using MP3 tech — hey, it was the best avail­able in the Dinosaur Days of 2002 — and had tried to strike a bal­ance between size and quality.

See, my CD col­lec­tion amounts to about 10 days’ music, and that’s not easy to stuff into an iPod.*

So with iTunes 7 I started explor­ing AAC and dis­cov­ered that at a higher bitrate I could still enjoy the orig­i­nal MP3 rips, with bet­ter qual­ity and with only a mar­ginal increase in over­all size per track.

In the expe­di­tion I found Joy Division’s Substance, and got to think­ing about New Order. Specifically, I stum­bled across Run 2 on iTunes, and it reignited a lot of memories.

Continue read­ing →