Category: observations

Submissions are being accepted for the 2007 pinhole camera.

some nice stuff here: take a look if you’re interested.

Please help us make Yellow Elephant synonymous with Coward:

Attention bloggers:

We need your help to ensure that the Google [tm] search engine ranks Operation Yellow Elephant at the top whenever anyone searches on coward.

So, can you please link to Operation Yellow Elephant with “coward“? ‘Sort of the same thing that Dan Savage did with “santorum“? And someone else apparently did with “failure“?

Thanks very much.

Seriously, when you have the National Field Director of the Leadership Institute claim to be committed to his country to winning the Global War on Terrorism tell an OYE supporter recently, “I have no desire to serve.” He continued, “Show me the need” [for me to enlist], how can they be taken seriously? Leadership, my foot.

Working on a couple of projects that haven’t been going well, so I decided to push my luck and open up GarageBand. Getting back to something that used to a good stress reliever seemed like a good idea.

Hmm. No end of problems getting it to actually work. The PPC minis are way short on USB ports, GarageBand doesn’t like hubs, the iMic II and the sound drivers are often at loggerheads, so much so, I had to reboot.

Anyway, a bit later, this little snippet emerged. I swear I tune up before I play, but I think my veg-o-matic technique makes it impossible to tell. The drum track needs work. I found a sample that fits nicely against one section but not for the others.

If you feel like messing with the GarageBand project (if for no other reason than to remove all the tracks in disgust), here it is. Note the size . . .

-rw-r–r– 1 paul paul 45855737 Aug 13 23:26 public/8-13.tar.gz

If these files weren’t so big, it might be interesting to collaborate with them. Perhaps they’re not insurmountably big, if you transferred/synchronized in the background.

The Right Stuff:

“My God, here we have a terrorist threat against hearth and home and the very first thing that comes out of their mind is how can we turn this to partisan advantage. I find that offensive,” Lamont said in an interview Sunday with The Associated Press.

If John Kerry could have spoke the truth so succintly, he’d likely be president today.

And Joe Lieberman would still be the Democratic nominee, if he had the “principles” to say it.

the visitors web stats application has been in service here for awhile, but I just re-jiggered how it’s used so I can get daily, monthly and year to date stats.

Interesting stuff, but I wish it incorporated a DNS resolver library or could access the cached results from webalizer.

“Wait, Aren’t You Scared?”:

Maybe it’s just, I cast my eyes back on the last century …

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

But in these shrunken times, this is the best we can do:

US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

… and I’m just a little tired of being on the wrong side of that historical arc.

See also.

My father just sent this along: you could update some of the historical personages and maybe swap out some of the practical questions for more relevant one (the price of coal is not so useful: perhaps a determination of the difference between oil by the barrel and gasoline by the gallon?)

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, KS, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th GRADE FINAL EXAM

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no Modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of: lie, lay and run
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per meter?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance?
around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U. S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U. S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United State s.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, sub vocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u! ‘.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’ Name two
exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each. 7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane,
fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver,
Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall & Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Then read this.

1. Playground / XTC / Wasp Star (Apple Venus, Volume 2)
2. Flight Of The Cosmic Hippo / Béla Fleck & The Flecktones / Live Art (Disc 2)
3. Choice In The Matter / Aimee Mann / I’m With Stupid
4. Fight Test / The Flaming Lips / Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
5. Move On / David Bowie / Lodger
6. Love’s Melody (Melodie au Crepuscule) / Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli / Verve Jazz Masters 38: Django Reinhardt
7. ‘Doctor Gradus Ad Parnassum’ [from Children’s Corner] / Béla Fleck / Perpetual Motion
8. Near Wild Heaven / R.E.M. / Out Of Time
9. Reptile / The Church / Starfish
10. Hung Up On You / Fountains Of Wayne / Welcome Interstate Managers

Bonus: Justice Tonight/Kick It Over / The Clash / Black Market Clash

Feel free to kick in your own list

Nutpicking:

NUTPICKING….Last night I held a contest to create a name for the moronic practice of trawling through open comment threads in order to find a few wackjobs who can be held up as evidence that liberals are nuts. It’s both lazy and self-refuting, since if the best evidence of wackjobism you can find is a few anonymous nutballs commenting on a blog, then the particular brand of wackjobism you’re complaining about must not be very widespread after all.

Anyway, I emailed the guy who suggested this contest and appointed him the official judge of the responses. Today he emailed back with his decision. Proposed by BlueMan, the winner is:

Nutpicking

Hoorah for BlueMan! If I had a free t-shirt to send you, I would. As it is, all you get is your own tiny slice of immortality. For the rest of you, here are some usage examples:

I see that K Lo is busily nutpicking away over at The Corner.

Lanny Davis is now the official King of the Nutpickers.

Man, the nutpickers were out in force after Tuesday’s Ned Lamont victory.

As for the law itself, Tim F. suggests “Drum’s Law” instead of “Kevin’s Law” because, as one of his commenters puts it, the former “sounds like it’s a response to an abducted toddler.”

That’s fine with me. Now go out and propagate this meme!

Flying Under Security Level Red:

I thought they were saving red for another horrific day like 9/11, when there’s such a heightened state of emergency that planes are grounded, government officials head for safety, people scramble to account for loved ones and TV goes 24/7 terror.

Well, you might do that. But you’re not watching your party’s hold on the levers of power weaken, or the stain of corruption creeping ever-closer. So you wouldn’t need to use terror and fear as weapons on your own people.