Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's
chemical formula - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - and was amazed to
discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing
kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.
The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film)
and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches
that for the rock containing kryptonite.
Fantastic news from the world of astronomy, dear readers. Wait! Wait! Don’t close this blog yet; I promise it’s interesting. Scientists have discovered what could be the first earth-like planet to contain liquid water outside our solar system. It’s in the constellation Libra and circles a red dwarf star horrendously-named Gliese 581, and currently has the disappointingly awful moniker “Gliese 581 C.” The planet appears to be rocky like ours and boasts mild temperatures ranging from 32-104˚F. These conditions hold the possibility of liquid water; ergo, life, ladies and gentlemen.
Planet Gliese 581 C is relatively small, about 1.5 times the size of Earth, and orbits very close its sun, making its year only about 13 earth days long. But since Gliese 581 is a red dwarf, and much dimmer and cooler than our sun, the planet has very mild temperatures. The environment would be a bit different, however, since the sun in the sky of the planet would look about 5 times larger than our sun, and have a reddish, rusty appearance almost like the surface of Mars. You would weigh a fair amount more there, though, because despite being only about 50% larger than Earth it has 5 times more mass.
I’ll set this one up in the most casual way I can: At least 61 women were given forced abortions in China last week, as reported by a The China Aid Association, a human rights watch group.
Late last week horrifying reports began coming out of China’s Guangxi province that local officials were forcing certain women to have abortions, in line with their laws that each couple only have one child. Most of the couples were expecting a second child, but expected they would only have to pay a fine like most other parents have done recently. In a blast from the past of hardcore, brutal bureaucracy, Family Planning Officials “escorted” 41 pregnant women to the Youjiang District People’s Hospital in Baise City where they were given forcible abortions by 3 injections to the stomach. The first is to induce labor, and the other two go directly into the babies head, drugging and killing it. That was last Tuesday. On Wednesday another 20 women were dragged in and given the same treatment. It appears at least some of the women were Christian and disagreed with the Republic’s one-child law.
Early reports out of the Chinese government run the gamut from “we haven’t heard anything about this” to assertions that the couples are outright lying. These sort of human rights violations are not uncommon when you have a Communist government that has very little oversight at the local level, and promotions are based solely on results. Last year Baise City posted a 13.61% birth rate; 0.11% higher than the mandated 13.5%. This may be the reason for the forced abortions, but anonymous citizen sources in China claim it happens regularly in some areas.
The “bit” I’m alluding to in my devilishly clever title up there is Mr. Short-Term-Memory from the very forgettable early ‘90s on SNL, where Tom Hanks portrays a man who can’t hold memories for more than a few seconds. You may have seen the dramatic interpretation Memento. The only thing I remember about the skit was that Tom is on a date at a restaurant and at one point takes a bite of food, chews, spits it out, looks at it and says, “This restaurant serves already chewed food!”
It quickly became apparent that Gonzales was going to be less than forthcoming with the information, as he has either completely lost his grip on time, space and the nature of reality, or is a liar. Gonzales admitted only to remembering that yes, he had made the decision to fire the attorneys, but not when, where, and indeed what that decision had entailed. Gonzales reached a new high of surreal fuckery when he said that even though he didn’t remember making the decision or for what reasons he made it, it was still the right call and he would do it again. If you can follow the crazy-straw string of logic involved in that statement you’re a better man than I.
Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) had the honor of perhaps the most gracious way to call someone a bald-faced, fucking liar: “The reality is that your characterization of your participation is just significantly, if not totally, at variance with the facts.”
The Senate panel has called for the other top administration members implicated in this douchebagery, uber-demon Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, to testify. You may remember Miers in roles such as “hilariously stupid Bush Supreme Court nominee.” Since neither Rove nor Miers are directly connected to oversight committees, they probably can’t be compelled to testify. Not if Dubya has anything to say about it, anyway.
they won’t be under oath. Great! Bush’s nickname must be Monty Hall. I can fathom no reason to refuse to testify under oath other than to reserve the ability to lie your ass off. In real life that’s called “perjury.” In the White House it’s called “executive privilege.” What a racket.
While doing a little research on gun laws for yesterday’s post, I came across quite a little gem of a website. Did you know society as we understand it is going to collapse? Like, next week, I guess? Yep, and some nut-job has a website either telling you how to survive it, or how to cause it, I can’t tell. Whatever the point of it is, you know you’re in for a wild ride when the phrase “New World Order” makes its first appearance. If you feel that this is just what has been missing in your life, by all means read all about “The Plan” here. For the rest of you I’ll just hit the high points.“Defeat the New World Order and become a millionaire in less than 180 days! Author Discovers New World Order’s Achilles’ Heel!”
After only a few paragraphs I began to suspect this manifesto was written by a rather shoddy Motivational Speaker who just Jerry-McGuire-snapped one day and decided, “Fuck it, man. I’m going to go live in a compound; who’s coming with me?” As proof I offer you the following ball of crazy, designed to teach us a fantastic lesson about “jumping” to conclusions:Let me give you an example of why it's important to get all of the facts before making a decision. If I promised you $5 million to jump out of an airplane
without a parachute, would you do it? If you quickly answered "no" you lost an easy $5,000,000. You see, the plane I was asking you to jump from was parked on the ground.
The fact is, that all the other hotly promoted freedom techniques you may have heard about just don't work in the real world!
Tired of all those bargain-basement, bullshit freedom techniques for overthrowing the government and profiting wildly from the downfall of society? Try us! The flat-out loony humor of the sales pitch for his brand of anti-government nonsense carries on for awhile, but the deeper I got into this document the more it goes from being dismissively amusing to downright creepy and frightening. Though, still in a kind of dumb way; like reading Mein Kampf if it were written by Paris Hilton. Here’s the crux of his argument:Legislators take and carry-out their marching orders from the Hidden Hand because they are bribed and/or threatened. They are told that if they don't pass this or that legislation, then the Hidden Hand will carry out all sorts of actions against them, including death. Our Mission is to first make these legislators MORE afraid of God and His soldiers than of the Hidden Hand, to the point where no one will even want to be a legislator anymore.
So…yeah. The author goes on to say that the Division of Family Services is actually set up to take healthy children away from their happy, God-fearing homes and place them into the evil foster care system for a nice life of abuse and raping. Oh! And the N.W.O. had Kennedy killed because he was attempting to repeal the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve. And here’s the part where you all become millionaires:FORCE the Federal Reserve Bank to give back the Trillions of dollars that it has stolen from the people since 1913. When divided equally, this money should make every person in America an instant millionaire.
There’s been quite a fervor over all things firearms in the past two days, in the wake of the horrors at Virginia Tech. But not to worry, America, the current gun laws and ease with which one can acquire a boom-stick won’t be wavering soon. Following the similar grisly murders at Columbine a then Republican-led Congress actually set about loosening the requirements for getting your sweaty little hands on a gun. This time around, scant days after the worst school slaying in history, both Republicans and Democrats are backing away from the issue with their hands raised.
It should at least be as hard to get a gun as it is to procure a passport. And I can guaran-fucking-tee you that it isn’t, because I am in the process of getting said document for travel to Mexico for our honeymoon. In the amount of time I have spent attempting to get and waiting for appointments, gathering every document in this Universe or others proving I do, in fact, exist and am an American citizen, and shelling out exorbitant fees for a little paper book, I could have a weapons’ closet that would make those guys in the woods of Montana blush.
I haven’t had as many issues with getting a passport as some other stories I’ve heard, but it’s been no picnic. For starters the fee is a whopping $97 and for that price you don’t even get the loving caress of a reach-around. The offices are conveniently only open during the hours I work; from 8 am until 4:30 pm Monday through Friday, with a nice, leisurely break in the middle for lunch. There is an office in Nixa open on Saturdays, but the wait to get an appointment is in the neighborhood of 1-2 months. Since the inception of the law in January requiring all air passengers leaving the US to have a passport, the offices have become clogged with requests, backing up the regular time to get one to a staggering 10 weeks. Oh, but if you care to fork over an extra $60 you can have a “rush” passport issued to you at the Mercurial speed of 6 weeks…which it appears I’ll have to accept as I back into the office with my pants down and my wallet open, since the last time I went there the kindly female behind the counter informed me that I have the “short form” of my birth certificate, and would need to send off for a copy of the “long form.”
After all is said an done this passport venture will end up costing me about $187 just for the privilege of being allowed to come back home to a country where, in the matter of an hour and after the security of a short phone call, some dude in a blood-stained t-shirt with the arms cut off so we all get a nice eyeful of his bramble of pit-hair can walk out of an all-night guns & ammo store with enough firepower to have that psychotic last stand-off with the FBI he’s always wanted.
Today I received one of these ridiculous emails with a laundry list of insane right-wing complaints about America, claiming to be attributed to Andy Rooney’s old, odd ramblings from 60 Minutes. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much care for Mr. Rooney’s particular brand of crazy “observations,” but even I don’t believe the old coot would say some of these downright hateful things.
2. Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer. You can kill someone with a baseball bat or a car, but no one is trying to ban you from driving to the ball game.
11. We did not go to the aid of certain foreign countries and risk our lives in wars to defend their freedoms, so that decades later they could come over here and tell us our constitution is a living document; and open to their interpretations.
17. I am sick of "Political Correctness." I know a lot of black people, and not a single one of them was born in Africa ; so how can they be "African-Americans"? Besides, Africa is a continent. I don't go around saying I am a European-American because my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was from Europe I am proud to be from America and nowhere else
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is dead, ladies and gentlemen. If you know who he is than you’ll join with me in feeling the Universe get just a little bit darker for the flickering out of a great American author. If you don’t know Vonnegut, I highly recommend popping down to the library and picking a book of his at random. Might I suggest Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse-Five for starters? Breakfast and Slaughterhouse were both made into exceedingly strange and wonderful films, and Cat’s Cradle is rumored to be in the works. Vonnegut kicked-off last night in Manhattan at 84 years old, apparently from injuries to his brain related to a recent fall.
Vonnegut fought in Germany in WWII and was a POW in Dresden when the allies firebombed it back to the Stone Age in 1945. Vonnegut would fold much of his experience there, including being forced to sift through the wreckage and stack bodies, for Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a man named Billy Pilgrim becomes “un-stuck” in time, bouncing back and forth between his time as a prisoner in Nazi Germany to his life on the planet Tralfamadore, where aliens instruct him on the pointlessness and illusion of human freedom.“This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself.
“I know,” I said.
“You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said.
“I know,” I said.
The world is now one deep thinker shorter. 
Let me start off by saying that I don’t think there’s anything inherently sad or pathetic about online dating sites. I think it’s actually a pretty good idea, and a way to reach far more potential mates than you otherwise could. However, I would point out that like any collection of people admittedly “looking for love,” you’re probably going to find a disproportionately large percentage of shit to shinola. I heard someone talking about a fella she had been in contact with through one of these sites:“I don’t know what it is about these internet guys, but you talk to them like
twice and they’re already professing their undying love.”
Apparently the best way to hear Mother Nature laugh is for you and your fiancée to get overly excited and go out and spend a fair chunk of change on a ridiculous amount of plants for your apartment’s postage-stamp-sized porch. I have announced on many occasions that I hate talking about the weather, but in the event of it just flat-out being a bitch, I’m willing to make an exception.
For those of you not privy to the delightfully fickle nature of Midwestern weather, the saying goes “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a day.” Which is kind of a goofy way of saying we have no fucking idea what to expect whenever we open our eyes every morning. It is entirely likely you can go to bed with a warm pattern of 75-degree weather only to wake up to snow and hail with a “raining frogs” chaser. So yeah, sometimes we get a freaky day here or there, but usually we’re back to seasonally normal the day after. Not this week. No, after two solid weeks of delightfully balmy 70-80˚ weather the beginning of April has decided to kick us squarely in the crotch with the icy foot of winter. Tuesday’s high was the low 50’s (still not bad) yesterday we didn’t crack 49˚ and it plummeted to the 20’s last night. Not to besmirch our Canadian brethren, but if I wanted to live in Jack Frost’s armpit I’d move to Alberta. Just…just check out the forecast, dear readers:
getting angrier and angrier the longer they sit without sufficient light sources. I’ll post pictures of the agriculture nightmare that has become our dining room later tonight, along with the sad desolation of the vacant plant racks on our concrete slab of a porch that was a garden oasis until that evil whore Mother Nature started cackling like a madwoman.
Stephen Colbert is fond of saying that he doesn’t see race. People tell him he’s white and he believes them. Me, I haven’t quite reached the pinnacle of color-blindness Colbert has, which is why the following website was so helpful.
Well that's all for now, kiddies. I have plenty more where that came from that I may post in the future, if you like that sort of thing.
As Hanni recently pointed out to me, a couple of centuries before the Reformation in Europe, there were a lot of really rather fucked up religions. And that’s saying something, because remember this is “fucked up” compared to a huge, political and hierarchal institution who believe some guy was not only born to a virgin, but was God and also the Son of God, who loves you but is going to torment you in perpetuity if you happen not to believe he exists. And there’s something about a Ghost, but I digress.
I’ve been listening to an audiobook course called “God Wills It!”: Understanding the Crusades by Professor Thomas Madden for the past few days and, as you might guess, it’s about the Crusades which primarily took place between the 11th and 14th centuries. You might remember a recent reference to them when our delightfully ignorant President called our recent actions in the Middle East a “crusade,” and a bunch of people we don’t understand very well over there were a touch miffed at the reference to a bloody Middle Ages Christian campaign to conquer Muslim cities. I won’t bore you with what I’ve learned about them; I’ve probably stretched your interest in this blog as it is. In the course of reading, however, I did come across a religious movement I’d never heard about before, which gives Scientology a run for its money in balls-out lunacy. It was called Catharism.
Here’s where it gets sticky. Since the body was a creation of evil and matter, Cathars believed it was your duty to consume as little as possible, and in fact the highest form of religious divinity was to starve to death. Good news, anorexics! Those who renounced possessions, remained celibate and ate as little as possible could become Elders or “Perfects”. This wasn’t expected of all followers, and, understandably, was usually completed rather late in life. Like right before death.
Eventually the Catholic Church pretty much destroyed the Cathars, through calls for internal, European crusade and Inquisition. Most of the credit lies with Pope Innocent III, who enjoys the fame of calling for the most convoluted, fucked-up of all the Crusades, number 4, which instead of actually conquering any of the Muslim-held Holy Lands, ended up sacking Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in Europe. Well done, you pointy-hatted loony. The Cathars were odd, but at least they didn’t believe some ancient Galactic War Lord seeded the earth with spirits by trapping them in volcanoes and dropping nuclear weapons on top of them. Fuck you, Tom Cruise.
