Category: observations

Silver Linings and a Cross of Gold (Harpers.org):

It turns out there’s an upside to the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah—if you’re waiting for the second coming of Christ. Here’s a selection of excited messages spotted over the last few days on the Rapture Ready/End Times Chat online bulletin board.

Praise God! We are chosen to be in these times and also watch and spread the word. Something inside me is exploding to get out, and I don’t know what it is. Its kind of like I want to do cartwheels around the neighborhood.

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In another thread, someone brought up the fact that the kidnapping of the first Israeli soldier that started this whole thing was on June 25th and if you count from that day to August 3rd…….it is *EXACTLY 40 days!!!!!*

I find that to be a HUGE coincidence.

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A question just popped in my head. Do you think children of around say 7 or 8 (but before the age of accountability) that have been indoctrinated up until that time by their parents religious beliefs will be raptured? . . . For example, would a 7 year old muslim be raptured? I know G-d will do right but I was just wondering everyone’s thoughts. I hate to think of kids being left here.

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Got that dancing feeling on the inside of me.

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This is the busiest I’ve ever seen this website in a few years! I have been having rapture dreams and I can’t believe that this is really it! We are on the edge of eternity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Whoa! I can sure feel the glory bumps after reading this thread!

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I too am soooo excited!! I get goose bumps, literally, when I watch what’s going on in the M.E.!! And Watcherboy, you were so right when saying it was quite a day yesterday, in the world news, and I add in local news here in the Boston area!! Tunnel ceiling collapsed on a car and killed a woman of faith, and we had the most terrifying storms I have ever seen here!! But, yes, oh happy day, like in your screen name , it is most indeed a time to be happy and excited, right there with ya!!

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I am excited beyond words that the struggle of this life may be over soon and I can finally be FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!
* * *

This is so exciting….I’m having a hard time believing this is ‘real’!

Continue reading “glory bumps”

Car racing, whether it be F1 or NASCAR, seems to spark debate as whether it’s a sport (I can accept that) and whether it’s practitioners are athletes (not so sure on that).

Even if one were to concede that the strategy and tactical aspects make it a challenge akin to chess, how to take the news that going from an oval to a three-cornered track poses a “puzzle” for the teams.

roval: n. The Pocono Triangle — Typically referred to as a “roval,” Pocono Raceway is one of the most unique tracks that the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series travels to. With its long straights and three distinct corners, Pocono Raceway is a puzzle for most teams and crew chiefs. — “Pocono II: Robby Gordon preview” Motorsport.com July 18, 2006. Categories: English, Automotive, Sports — More information about roval and related words at Double-Tongued Word Wrester.

And it’s not like the turns come all that close together:

Pocono Raceway has long been recognized as one of NASCAR’s most competitive speedways. Pocono’s unique 2.5-mile track features three turns, each with its own degree of banking (Turn 1 – 675 ft., 14 degrees, Turn 2 – 750 ft., 8 degrees, Turn 3 – 800 ft., 6 degrees) and three straights (Main Straight – 3,740 ft. (or 7/10ths of a mile), Long Pond Straight-3,055 ft. and the North Straight – 1,780 ft. (or 1/3 of a mile).

Granted the cars are going 200 mph meaning the turns come up pretty fast, but still, does a track with one fewer turn and one fewer straight bit really pose that much of a challenge? Is the issue that Pocono is different or that all other tracks are unchallengingly dull?

Technorati Tags: C112, C112, C57, C57, C87, C87, roval_1, roval_1

Continue reading “Friday cat blogging: meet Cadbury”

Picture an image like this to convey the almost universal adoption of Kyoto, the world’s almost complete rejection of the death penalty, the near-complete rejection of torture or land mines.

There’s a CafePress item (or three) I would happily buy and wear. I’m sure someone is making them right now.

From: Pushkin:

Many months ago I found myself exploring a website with the collected works of Alexander Pushkin, and taking inspiration from the Samuel Pepys blog, I thought it might be fun to import Pushkin’s letters into an email client. Apart from the novelty value, the mail client provides all kinds of very useful search and sort features you don’t usually get with literary texts.

I’ve finally gotten around to trying it – you can download this mbox file of his early letters, which I have only checked with Mail.app. The titles are all in Russian, but many of the letters are written in French, so speakers of either language may find them interesting.

I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.

The messages are in HTML format because the site I got them included many links to useful supporting material. All emoticons, however, have been removed.

In the future I would like to set up an IMAP server for this kind of historical correspondence, so people can annotate letters by replying to them. For the moment, I’m just trying to amass material – drop me a line if you know of good online sources for other authors.

Unlike other notable whiners, Maciej understands that while mbox is not a standard, IMAP is. Shame about the emoticons, though.

Not sure how I missed this epic (in size and scope) takedown of “conservative thought” but better late than never. This snippet jumped out at me:

John & Belle Have A Blog: Dead Right:

And so it turns out Lionel Trilling was maybe not such a poor prophet after all, when he wrote way back in 1953: “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition;” for the anti-liberals do not, by and large, “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

What is modern conservatism but saying no?

It has been a long time coming but I finally found a way to integrate static content into WordPress’s Pages. Pages with a P are like posts but exist outside their time-based organization.

I have had this search query cloud forever but had no way to integrate it into the site, since it gets updated nightly, WordPress doesn’t allow you to include files in posts or [Pp]ages and I didn’t really want to create a static WordPress frame to wrap around it. There had to be a Better Way.

It’s really just as easy as the author claims: I had to make one adjustment to allow for files with a .txt ending but I suspect I didn’t really need to do that.

There are a bunch of WordPress plugins that claim to make this possible. Not one of them did. And this one is designed to protect you from yourself by only including files from a designated directory reserved for includes.

Thanks again, Jack.

So I add this and this and get a 2.4Ghz server that fits on a bookshelf?

Not that I have $300 burning a hole in my pocket but it seems pretty amazing to me.

I has to look up something about Loading Large Format Film Holders since I just bought one from a local shop to go with a bunch of cigar boxes I plan to experiment with.
It looks less hairy than I feared, but I won’t be at all surprised if I get the film in backwards or pull the dark slide at the wrong time or not at all. And that doesn’t even cover developing the stuff afterwards.

I scored a partly full box (some would say partly empty) of Kodak Pan film (Develop before Mar 1970[!]). It’ll do for experimental purposes.

<grumble> I just noticed on looking it up that the film is 5×7: that won’t fit in a 4×5 holder now, will it? So add “read the ^&*() box” to the list of things to learn.

While I was digging through the film, I found a nice condition T-Max readyload film holder: those sell for a bundle on eBay. Perhaps I should taken the chance, but I let the owner know about it anyway. I guess the junk boxes can be rewarding for everyone.

A small black cat — the blackest cat I have ever seen — has joined my household, all the way from Kyrgyzstan[1][2]. Cadbury, as her English owners have named her, is also the smallest adult cat I have ever seen.

She seems remarkably mellow after flying from Bishkek > Istanbul > Chicago > Seattle with a couple of layovers along the way. The Istanbul > Chicago leg was 13 hours by itself.

She’s doing what cats do — exploring — and I can hear the sounds of soft landings as she jumps down from various places she’s investigated.

She has a busy couple of days ahead of her. To be admitted to the UK/EU she needs a microchip implant, a rabies test, and general health documentation. The rabies test can only be performed by one lab (in Manhattan, Kansas) and she can’t be admitted to her true home until 6 months have elapsed since her last clean test.

And she may have fleas.

More as she reveals more of her personality, which if early signs are to be believed, is likely to be very sweet.