Watching a 007 movie on TV…
I’ve been watching Bond movies all my life. In every Bond movie except the ones with Timothy Dalton, at least one woman screws Bond then gets killed. What can we learn from this?
A) Don’t get involved with jealous guys
B) Don’t screw James Bond
C) Do A & B but be male
Into the Void
Back off, man, I'm co-creating my reality.
TFTD: The Zen of Bond
Inhumane Killing of Feral Cats
There was an awful article in one of the local papers about the township killing feral cats with an injection to the heart. That is so inhumane it takes my breath away. It is utter torture to the animal, painfully stopping the heart but not actually killing it immediately.
12. How does euthanasia of animals by veterinarians compare to lethal injection?
“potassium chloride fails to comply with minimum veterinarian standards because the lethal injection protocol does not include safeguards to ensure that the patient is unconscious before the injection of the drug, which would cause excruciating pain if the subject is conscious.”
Note that simply administering a paralytic doesn’t induce unconsciousness, it only makes it impossible for the animal to struggle. It is for the convenience of the onlookers. The protocol has to include a long-acting barbiturate to be sure than the animal doesn’t wake up during the killing.
It will have been completely obvious to the people administering single potassium chloride shots and watching the animals die that it is painful. These people have to be serious animal-abusing sadists to continue killing animals using this method.
Simply telling them to stop isn’t going to be enough. Everybody involved, right on up to the Mayor of the township, should have been jailed for animal abuse.
Now, according to the paper Ewing Twp is still catching and killing cats. Unless the program is now being administered by an ethical veterinarian, the horror most likely is continuing. Unless you’re down there watching every procedure yourself, you can be sure it is.
I submit that this is due to Ailurophobia in the administration and that the stated public health excuse is nothing more than manipulative sophistry. I am completely certain that the Township snatches beloved pets and treats them in the same hideous manner that they treat feral cats.
Death at the hands of an underpaid municipal employee isn’t humane treatment of animals no matter what the SPCA says.
Ewing Township needs to get the animal abusing freaks out of the administration and get some enlightened human beings in there.
Derivation of the Name "Ellis"
The ancestry sites like to say that Ellis became a popular baby name after the Crusades1. Something about the prophet Elijah, a tribute to the Holy Land. Since people were named by who their father was, it became a surname. That might be the case.
They also like to say Ellis is a Welsh name. The double ll in Welsh names is pronounced the same way as the tl in Quetzalcoatl2, so Ellis probably isn’t an Anglicized Welsh word
There’s an excellent site in Glasgow that states the name came from the Saxon King Ælle3, who invaded the East of England in the 5th century AD. Another great baby name. That would make Ellis an Anglo-Saxon name.
1 The Crusades, 
in case you missed that day in history class, were a series of twelve Christian forays into the Middle East to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslim infidels. The Crusades were all complete failures, which is why so many of us objected to President Bush’s use of the word in describing his Big Plan for revenge after 9-11. The Crusaders were absolved of their sins if they died in battle, which may have been a contributing factor. Gunpowder didn’t reach Europe until after the 9th Crusade, another contributing factor.
2 To make the sound, make the t sound like a cross between a hard c and a t without a syllable break before the l. This should keep you occupied for hours. The English pronounce it as “kl” and leave it at that. A good description of how to form the sound is available on the Gwybodiadur site.
3 Type Æ as alt-0-1-9-8 on a Microsoft Windows compatible keyboard. Code it with the Æ or Æ html entities. This is why the ligature Æ is falling into disuse.
Jonathan Richman "Roadrunner"
An oldie but goodie that will probably date me.
Roadrunner, Roadrunner,
Going faster miles an hour.
Gonna drive past the Stop-N-Shop
With the radio on!
LOST
What a freaking nightmare. I lost my phone a couple of weeks ago. Of course, I haven’t been backing it up, it’s only a phone…
Then I realized how much of my life I keep in there. I get email from three different accounts, and store the passwords. I have “secret” email addresses or passwords for posting status and photos to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, TwitPic, MySpace and of course this WordPress blog. All my friends’ contact information is in there.
The first thing I did was call AT&T to ask them to physically locate the phone. Maybe it was in the car, wedged up between the seats where I couldn’t see it or hear it ring. The nice lady at AT&T support told me about the AT&T Family Map. It isn’t mentioned on the AT&T website at all, you must have the URL to get to it. Check this out, the account holder can track the rest of the family all day. The following result shows an aerial view of the back of my house looking in the window at me. If the picture were in taken in real time it would be seriously creepy.
I am -*here*-
I spent an inordinate amount of time deciding on a new phone. The iPhone was tempting, but I played with one a bit in the AT&T store and decided that a touchscreen phone needs haptic feedback. In the end I wimped out and bought the Samsung Jack.
So now all I have to do is recreate the information in the old phone.
TinyTube is YouTube for phones that don’t support rtsp streaming media. The Jack doesn’t, so this is a big deal for me!
I had to reinstall QuickMark. The lastest version will Twitter the text after decoding. Very kewl. It’s not optimized for the Jack, however. Remind me to send them a screen shot.
Samsung: Imagine Living in the World of Tomorrow Now
Awesome Japanese Wii Game
Just found this interesting Wii Wii game on Thinkgeek. According to the blurb on the box,
“Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing.”
Awesome!
Bungee Jumping
No, not really, but looking at my Fidelity account recently has felt like it, and not in a good way. I should have spent my money on gambling and drugs
AK-47, The Official Assault Weapon of the Mentally Ill
Gun Sales: Will The “Loophole” Close?
In an interview with Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes on April 12, 2009, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D) firmly equated mental illness with criminal insanity by repeatedly using the phrase “criminals and the mentally ill.”
If it wasn’t bad enough that she did irreparable damage to the reputations of hundreds of thousands of folks, Sen. Feinstein stated that the AK-47 is the weapon of choice for the mentally ill.
Does the mentally ill community have an official gun? Perhaps they have an endorsement deal with Kalashnikov… “AK-47, The Official Assault Weapon of the Mentally Ill.” Or “Just Do Them.”
AKs [rifles] and other firearms, once forbidden under the ban, now fill entire tables at gun shows; you can buy them from private sellers without a background check.
“These assault weapons are essentially designed and made to kill numbers of people in close combat,” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California told Stahl.
Sen. Feinstein was the author and champion of the assault weapons ban in 1994. “They become the guns of choice of drug cartels, of gangs, of people who are mentally incompetent.”
— 60 Minutes, April 12, 2009
“Gun Sales: Will The “Loophole” Close?”
Et tu, Sen. Feinstein?
Windows 7 under VMWare
Screen capture: Windows 7 running under VMWare.
I really like VMWare. I’ve installed Windows 7 Beta into a virtual machine.
A virtual machine is an operating system running within a software computer. The computer is no computer. It’s all rather zen.
Author! Author!
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