4 - 2006 | ***Dave Does the Blog

Doctor Who themes a-plenty

Spiffyness. A faboo collection of just about every variation of the Doctor Who theme that’s been officially broadcast. It’s interesting all the variations on the original Ron Granier music that…

Spiffyness. A faboo collection of just about every variation of the Doctor Who theme that’s been officially broadcast. It’s interesting all the variations on the original Ron Granier music that have taken place — some of them frankly, pretty awful. (For the record, I love the current Murray Gold incarnation of Granier’s theme).

Here’s a nice collection of Doctor Who sound effects and dialog bits.

And for more history on the themes (not including the current mix or the ’96 movie), here’s some great historical narrative.

Roll your own Doctor Who theme

In my search for a Doctor Who ringtone for my Treo 650, I ran across this site which lets you mix … well, mix your own Doctor Who theme elements….

In my search for a Doctor Who ringtone for my Treo 650, I ran across this site which lets you mix … well, mix your own Doctor Who theme elements. Hours of fun, at least until your housemate strangles you or makes you plug in headphones.

Crack in the World

Watched one of my favorite Saturday Matinee movies (i.e., movies I used to watch as a kid on Saturday afternoons on Channel 13 back in California): Crack in the World…

Watched one of my favorite Saturday Matinee movies (i.e., movies I used to watch as a kid on Saturday afternoons on Channel 13 back in California): Crack in the World (1965).

The cover says it all:

THAN GOD IT’S ONLY A MOTION PICTURE!
Science miscalculates … underground Atom Bomb explodes earth’s core … and the world totters on the brink of destruction!
Today’s Terrifying Look into What Might Happen Tomorrow!

I mean, who could ask for anything more? We got:

Volcanoes!
Stampedes!
Atomic weapons!
Duelling scientists!
More volcanoes!
The UN!
Earthquakes!
Love triangles!
Veldt! Atolls! The Ocean! The Land!
Train wrecks!
Mass destruction!
People gathering in St Peter’s Square praying for a miracle!
Lava! Lots and lots of lava! Magma, too!
Massive elaborate sets!
Still more volcanoes!
Destruction of massive elaborate sets!
Lots of pyrotechnics!
Lots of stock footage!
Cute animals!
Apocalyptic devastation on a planet-shattering scale!

They just don’t make moves like this any more 00 which is kind of a shame (though it has some of ther fans like me). Great fun, and bring the popcorn.Picked up a copy (not … exactly … issued by the copyright holder) on eBay, and don’t regret it in the least.

Google Calendar

No time to check it out right now, but given Google’s track record, I’d be willing to bet that Google Calendar will be clean and sweet….

No time to check it out right now, but given Google’s track record, I’d be willing to bet that Google Calendar will be clean and sweet.

Anansi Boys

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman (as read by Lenny Henry) Finally finished reading — well, that’s not right, finally finished listening to Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. I’ve had the hardcover…

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman (as read by Lenny Henry)

Finally finished reading — well, that’s not right, finally finished listening to Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. I’ve had the hardcover for a while, but Stan loaned me the Audio CDs and I’ve been listening to them on my commute

Triffic. Just triffic.

Not surprising. Gaiman is a master at injecting myth into the modern, at seamlessly blending farce, drama, horror, fantasy, and anything else he puts his mind to. And he does it with a spot-on delightful use of the language.

Anansi Boys is the story of Fat Charlie Nancy, a rather pathetic Caribbean-descent emigre from the US to the UK. Fearful, phobic, put-upon, and an all-around schlub, he discovers, through various delightful-to-read events, that he has a brother he never knew about; that their father was Anansi the spider-trickster god; and that there are wheels within wheels within wheels that will threaten to destroy his life (not to mention kill him), even while promising something far greater …

The novel features any number of marvelous supporting characters, bound together by a storyline that, weblike, is not always obvious, but eventually brings everyone together in the end.

I’ve been a Gaiman fan for years, so it’s not surprising this tale grabbed me. It’s both touching and stirring, shifting effortlessly from a familiar-enough-to-make-you-cringe psychological study of Fat Charlie, to a holy-crap bit of high magic and myth, interspersed with tales of Anansi both modern and timeless. It’s more intimate than American Gods, but broader in scope than Neverwhere. It’s just too much fun.

Lenny Henry does a great job, too, as the reader on the CD set, his voice carrying the pathos of Fat Charlie, the slickness of Spider, the playful cantankerousness of Anansi, the smarminess of Graham Coates, the unctuous threat of Tiger — all of the characters come alive in his rendition.

I cannot speak well enough of the novel, even if the ending is just a bit weak — the problem with a novel where the characters actually grow and change is that sometimes they change away from what made them most appealing. But I don’t regret a single minute I spent listening to Anansi Boys — and, in fact, am taking the hardcover on my upcoming business trip so that I can enjoy some of the fine language at my leisure, and am loaning onward the CDs to Margie to listen to on her commute.

In short: highly recommended. Thanks, Stan.

If she doesn’t win in New Orleans, maybe Bear Country will take her

Kimberly Williamson Butler is running for mayor New Orleans. And she’s got a great picture of herself at her campaign website (the banner, in fact) standing in the French Quarter…

Kimberly Williamson Butler is running for mayor New Orleans. And she’s got a great picture of herself at her campaign website (the banner, in fact) standing in the French Quarter in …

… um …

… Anaheim?

Yes, that is, indeed, the French Quarter at Disneyland’s New Orleans Square. Note (circled) the tell-tale Disney trash can. The red shuttered windows at the end of the way belong to Studio 33, if I have my geography right. Which Ms. Butler, clearly, does not.

(via BoingBoing, but first spotted by ThisJustin)

Aha! The root cause of the immigration problem is …

… abortion! That’s right! Never mind that Roe v. Wade is only 30 years old, and immigration from south of the border has been around for a lot longer. No,…

… abortion!

That’s right! Never mind that Roe v. Wade is only 30 years old, and immigration from south of the border has been around for a lot longer. No, Chuck Colson has the answer:

But what’s the root of the problem? Why do we have a shortage of workers? Aha, that’s the unspeakable “A” word that the elite dread the most: abortion. The reason we must allow millions of illegal aliens in to fill these jobs is because we have murdered a generation that would otherwise be filling them: 40 million sacrificed since 1973 to the god of self-fulfillment. And Americans are barely maintaining a replacement-level birthrate of 2.1 children per woman.
Remember the compassionate stuff that the abortionists used to tell us: “We are just preventing these poor kids from growing up in deprived, impoverished circumstances”? Hah! False. What happens is that others come in from abroad to live in those deprived, difficult, and impoverished circumstances and at great public cost.

I can’t even begin to address the historical and logical disconnects here (e.g., if we’d not had abortion, would those 40 million people be harvesting crops in the San Joaquin Valley? And would the illegals they’d displaced be, in turn, eking out a living down in Mexico? I think not, on both counts). I think it just stands on its own.

(via MediaMatters and Scott)

A knife right out of science fiction

It’s the Shocknife: a blunt-edged training knife that administers a non-lethal electric shock when it hits. ADVANTAGE #1 – Biofeedback Tool Set the adjustable SK-1 shock level to LOW and…

It’s the Shocknife: a blunt-edged training knife that administers a non-lethal electric shock when it hits.

ADVANTAGE #1 – Biofeedback Tool
Set the adjustable SK-1 shock level to LOW and the blade of the knife becomes your instructor. It uses a mild painless shock to provide feedback when your technique needs correction. Save time, energy, and money by training more efficiently.
ADVANTAGE #2 – Stress Exposure Training
A real knife attack creates a feeling of panic causing your body to respond with the “fight or flight” syndrome. That same acute stress can now be replicated during training by setting the SK-1 shock level to EXTREME. At this level the knife sparks and growls, ready to bite with each attack.
ADVANTAGE #3 – Cut Location Indicator
The SK-1 delivers a powerful shock upon contact allowing the trainee to recognize both WHERE and WHEN they were exposed during the attack. The shock will even arc through clothing! Unlike marking knives there is no messy marking compound to clean up after training.

It runs on a 9v battery — but doubtless one could find a way to bump up the power and end up with some keen sci-fi electro-blade kinda thing. I’m pretty sure my Star Wars RPG character had one of those …

(via J-Walk)

Consolidated Google

All of Google’s services on one page. Not sure it’s any more usable, but it’s interesting to see. It’s not just about Search any more. (via J-Walk)…

All of Google’s services on one page. Not sure it’s any more usable, but it’s interesting to see. It’s not just about Search any more.

(via J-Walk)

In the Good Old Columbine

There’s still a whole bunch of material related to the Columbine shootings that are under lock and key by the county authorities. Some of it was once revealed to the…

There’s still a whole bunch of material related to the Columbine shootings that are under lock and key by the county authorities. Some of it was once revealed to the media, but once “leaks” occured, it was locked down tight. But, seven years later — why? Is it because there’s such an incredible risk of provoking copy-cat gun sprees? Or is it because it would likely provide still more embarrassment to those same county authorities?

Welcome, once more, to the basement tapes — nearly four hours of posing, boasting and bitching by the obnoxious gods of self-awareness, two teenage killers-to-be named Harris and Klebold. The footage was shot in the last weeks of their short lives, the final segment just a few hours before the rampage at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, that left fifteen dead and seriously injured two dozen more. Seized by Jefferson County investigators right after the shootings, the tapes have been sitting in an evidence vault for the past seven years, seen by almost no one — except, of course, a small army of cops, attorneys, reporters, victims’ families, expert witnesses and assorted hangers-on.
That could change soon. Following a surprising decision by the Colorado Supreme Court last fall, which held that the tapes are part of the “records” generated by the Columbine investigation, Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink has been wrestling with the biggest quandary of his law-enforcement career. Should he refuse to release the basement tapes on the grounds that their dissemination is still (in the words of the state’s Criminal Justice Records Act) “contrary to the public interest” — and thus prolong a five-year court battle with the Denver Post? Or should he make the hate-filled rants, along with other long-suppressed writings and recordings taken from the killers’ homes, available to the world at last?
Mink has postponed announcing his decision until after the seventh anniversary of the massacre next week — out of respect, his office says, for the victims’ families, some of whom have pushed for the release of the materials while others have opposed it. But if history is any guide, he will oppose the release, sending the whole controversy back to court. County officials have treated the killers’ writings and tapes as an anthrax-like deadly contagion that must not, under any circumstances, be inflicted on an unsuspecting populace.

The arguments for keeping it secret are … unconvincing.

(via ObscureStore)

Just Say Don’t Walk!

NOTE: I have been told, by very clever and insightful people, that I have been far too subtle here. While explaining the joke is a good sign that it’s not…

NOTE: I have been told, by very clever and insightful people, that I have been far too subtle here. While explaining the joke is a good sign that it’s not a very good joke in the first place, let me just say that the following is satire, based on the inanity of abstinence-only sex education. There. Now enjoy.

Every year, many children are injured, and many accidents occur, because kids cross the street. This continues to occur, despite so-called “educational programs” that purport to tell kids how to cross the street “safely” — suggesting kids “Stop, Look, and Listen” or teaching that the clearly-misnamed “safe crossing” is possible at crosswalks and with crossing signals.

Despite such permissive and misguided attempts, accidents continue to occur. After all, sometimes cars run the lights at intersections, or go through crosswalks and hit pedestrians. Sometimes kids simply forget the right rules to follow in their immature passion to get to the other side.

Indeed, a consideration of the matter will show that teaching kids about “crossing safety” simply encourages them to cross the street, sanctions their self-endangerment, with the predictably tragic consequences.

So I’d like to propose a federally-mandated, nationwide Street Crossing Abstinence Program. This program’s message would be simple and direct: do not cross the street until you grow up. The simple motto “Just Say Don’t Walk” will keep kids away from streets — after all, as part of the program, they’ll have to promise to adhere to the code — and so solve this horrible national tragedy.

Such teaching must be absolute — it mustn’t be diluted by saying, “Don’t cross the street — but if you do, use the crosswalk and crossing signals.” No, we need to be morally firm and unambigious in our societal expectations: crossing the street under any circumstance is wrong, and no other option is to be even discussed.

Just Say Don’t Walk. It’s that simple.

I expect to get a call from the White House any day now …

SimTrafficjam

Fascinating simulator of traffic patterns on various road types. Hours of mesmerizing fun. (via GeekPress)…

Fascinating simulator of traffic patterns on various road types. Hours of mesmerizing fun.

(via GeekPress)

Monkey Girl

As I watch in a combo of terror and pride … What you can’t tell (because of the crappy picture) is that there’s another couple of feet of elevation on…

As I watch in a combo of terror and pride …

What you can’t tell (because of the crappy picture) is that there’s another couple of feet of elevation on the apparatus there. She just clambers up there with no trouble at all, even in her “skort.”

this post enabled by airblogging.com.

Cooks! Don’t Try This at Home!

Making a chocolate cake. With Cadbury Eggs. Instead of real … y’know, like chicken … eggs. Really. (via BoingBoing)…

Making a chocolate cake.

With Cadbury Eggs.

Instead of real … y’know, like chicken … eggs.

Really.

(via BoingBoing)

Kirby-eyesed

Very, very, very cool collage of Jack Kirby close-up-on-the-eyes panels from his various “Fourth World” comics. Keen. (The dialog is pretty cool, too.) (via BoingBoing)…

Very, very, very cool collage of Jack Kirby close-up-on-the-eyes panels from his various “Fourth World” comics. Keen. (The dialog is pretty cool, too.)

(via BoingBoing)

The Immigration Factor

I’m very conflicted over the whole immigration issue, what to do with illegals, etc. There are too many approaches to the problem — idealistic, pragmatic, historical, economical, ethical, etc. — to make the simple solutions offered by too many (“Keep ’em all out!” “Let ’em all in!”) make any sense to me. Whatever course we take, someone — many someones — are likely to be hurt, and precedents will be set that will have an impact far beyond this election cycle …

Still, I will at least enjoy the spectacle of conservative/nativist types in the House having managed to concoct a big scheme to garner public support, only to have it backfire on them big time.

In the wake of this week’s massive demonstrations, many House Republicans are worried that a tough anti-illegal-immigration bill they thought would please their political base has earned them little benefit while becoming a lightning rod for the fast-growing national movement for immigrant rights.
House Republicans rushed through legislation just before Christmas that would build hundreds of miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, require that businesses verify the legality of all employees’ status through a national database, fortify border patrols, and declare illegal immigrants and those who help them to be felons. After more lenient legislation failed in the Senate last week, the House-passed version burst into the public consciousness this week, as hundreds of thousands of protesters across the country turned out to denounce the bill.
[…] The hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets Monday vividly demonstrated the power of the issue, which some strategists say threatens to undercut President Bush’s long-standing hope of making Hispanic voters a GOP constituency.
“There was political calculation that they could make this the wedge issue of 2006 and 2008, but it’s not playing out that way,” said Rep. Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.). “This has galvanized and energized the Latino community like no other issue I have seen in two decades, and that’s going to have electoral consequences.”
Republicans say they could accept that sentiment if they believed they had won political points from the GOP’s restive base. But for all the negatives, they don’t have many positives to show for their efforts.

Not that the Hispanic community is necessarily monolithic, as both the Dems and GOP have tried to pretend they are. Not all of them feel the same way about immigration — or won’t, unless the whole “Us vs. Them” thing gets pressed too hard, as the GOP is discovering. On the other hand, the GOP’s appeal to the conservative social values in many Hispanic groups is still something to factor in before we make any serious predictions about the ’06 elections, and lots can happen between April and November …

UPDATE: Way too busy, and forgot to cite Les for the above WaPo link. He also has an interesting cite pointing back to some political precedents here:

Republicans apparently have a short memory on this issue: they need to go back and look at what happened to the GOP in California when then-Governor Pete Wilson backed 1994’s Proposition 187 ballot measure clamping down on illegal immigrants. The measure won (but later got tied up in court) and the GOP was decimated politically in California as Hispanic voters fled en masse to the Democratic party. (Wilson went from 47 percent of the Hispanic vote to 25 percent).

Wilson was not of the conservative social values mold, but it’s certainly a lesson that should have been learned.

I am so not Web 2.0

My blog scores an 8 out of 47 on the Web 2.0 Validator. My Doing Write blog gets a 6. My main page gets a 2. Though, looking at the…

My blog scores an 8 out of 47 on the Web 2.0 Validator. My Doing Write blog gets a 6. My main page gets a 2.

Though, looking at the rules, not only is it not surprising, I’m actually kinda pleased. (And, yes, the site is tongue-in-cheek.)

“Oh, stewardess, I speak Jive.”

Ever want to know how to say, “Once you go Black, you’ll never go back” or “You look like a biotch” in Japanese? Wonder no further. “OFF THE HOOK”, a…

Ever want to know how to say, “Once you go Black, you’ll never go back” or “You look like a biotch” in Japanese? Wonder no further.

“OFF THE HOOK”, a Dictionary of African American Slang. In Japanese. Being sold in the remainders section of a WHSmith in a sleepy provicial Norfolk town.
The weirdness quotient was just too high, and the price (only £2!) was too low not to buy it. Plus it’s author, Randall C. Miller Junior, looked cool!
I wasn’t disappointed. In fact I think, per penny, it’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever bought. I really wish I was Japanese, so I could use this book in anger. Just picture a Japanese tourist walking into a black neighborhood clutching this book.

I just wish I read Japanese.

He who pays the piper calls the tune

If a government agency is going to give money to a “faith-based” operation, to my mind that operation cannot turn around and say that they can only support folks who…

If a government agency is going to give money to a “faith-based” operation, to my mind that operation cannot turn around and say that they can only support folks who don’t offend their ideological sensitivities.

A St. Francis, Minn., Lutheran church refused to care for a woman who once was a man — adding its case in a growing national battle, a report said.
The case began last May, when Trinity Lutheran rejected providing day-care lunch services to the unidentified woman. The church said the gender change violated its beliefs, among other reasons.
The battle was resolved last month when the Missouri Synod church agreed to get no new clients from Anoka County, Minn.

Or, put another way, if you want to perform charity, more power to you. If you want to limit the folks to whom you do so based on your religious beliefs, that’s your prerogative, and you are more than welcome to gather up funds from folks who believe as you do in order to do so.

But if you accept my tax money, you give up the right to discriminate on, essentially, my behalf.

It’s your choice. It’s not an imposition of my will on yours. You can simply walk away from the money. If you can’t walk away from the money — well, you know the old joke about “we already know what you are, now we’re just settling on a price.”

News Flash! Sponsored Studies Favor Sponsor!

This will come as a shock, I’m sure, but the sponsor of the medical study seems to have an influence on how the study turns out. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly…

This will come as a shock, I’m sure, but the sponsor of the medical study seems to have an influence on how the study turns out.

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co. recently funded five studies that compared its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa with Risperdal, a competing drug made by Janssen. All five showed Zyprexa was superior in treating schizophrenia.
But when Janssen sponsored its own studies comparing the two drugs, Risperdal came out ahead in two out of three.
In fact, when psychiatrist John Davis analyzed every publicly available trial funded by the pharmaceutical industry pitting six new antipsychotic drugs against one another, nine in 10 showed that the best drug was the one made by the company funding the study.
“On the basis of these contrasting findings in head-to-head trials, it appears that whichever company sponsors the trial produces the better antipsychotic drug,” Davis and other experts wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
[…] By contrast, when the federal government recently compared a broader range of drugs in typical schizophrenia patients in a lengthy trial, the two medications that stood out were cheaper drugs not under patent. The medication that worked best for patients with severe, intractable schizophrenia was clozapine, whose sales lag well behind every other drug in its class. And an earlier leg of the study found that the largely dismissed drug perphenazine had about the same risks and benefits as far more expensive competitors that are widely assumed to be safer.

I’m … stunned …

… it took so long for someone to point this out.