for the wonder of the over and the under and the ’round

BEIJING Sep 17, 2005 — North Korean disarmament talks resumed Sunday as
chief envoys from the six nations met to resolve a dispute over a
Chinese proposal to allow Pyongyang keep its civilian atomic power
program after it disarms. ABC News.

Here’s my deal: The US needs to get rid of an equal percentage of our
own nukes if we ask other nations to stand down their arsenals. If we
ask them to get rid of their power plants, we should remove ours as
well. Fair is fair. No thought give to the notion that it’s a
wonderful source of electrical energy, no matter where you live, or
that we’d all be better off without warheads. Especially the United
States.

corn syrup drips down his chest, the color off

This NYT editorial almost has it right–but right now we don’t need to blame anyone. Let’s get the job done. Put a moratorium on blaming people, and fix NO [New Orleans, 2014-02-05] and everywhere else that got messed up by Katrina (hurray for my first Katrina-related post that has nothing to do with a stripper in Montreal). I don’t care whose fault it is. It could be Bush, it could be the NO government, it could be the friggin Democratic party for all I care. It could be the hippies or the glaciers, or even the elves. But pointing my finger at someone and saying “He did it!” never fixed whatever it was I had just broken.

On an aside, it’s really no one’s fault. We don’t need to blame people, we need to help people. 300 years of building your city below sea level on a coast that is repeatedly subjected to hurricanes, and nobody sees this as a bad idea in the first place? (this is what I like to call “blaming people who don’t care anymore). Seriously, to paraphrase what my mum said tonight, if Mother Nature doesn’t want a city there that night, then you had better believe it won’t be there in the morning.

[EDIT: Regarding the title, it probably refers to a movie we made for AP English at the end of my senior year of high school.  We used dyed corn syrup as blood (yes, that kind of movie).  Carry on. 2014-02-05]

Leonardo was a man, who had a craving for yams

“One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students’ weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, ‘When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.'”

Source

. [Financial Damage of Natural Disasters]

I find it difficult that we compare natural disasters on the basis of how much financial damage they cause. A large storm today will destroy more property than it did a hundred years ago, simply because we have more property. It might be useful to scale it according to the percentage of the national debt accumulated during the current presidency.

I would much rather focus on the amount [number, 2014-02-04] of people who have died. In this right, I think Katrina has not been our country’s largest natural disaster.

(on another scale note, I heard on the news today that people are buying more gas than ever, regardless of the price at the pump. Of course more gas is being bought: there are more people driving, and more SUVs and trucks on the road than ever before.)

wanting nothing but a cool glass of lemonade and some sunshine

When I get famous as a writer, I can just see the reviews of my blog:

“While most of the entries are entertainingly self-sufficient, intelligent, and written in a style that no one alive or dead could ever hope to imitate, the occasional descension into apparent self-loathing and despair takes away from the author that we truly know and love. If you can deal with the personal side of this literary mogul and its lack of writing ability, you will find nothing but joy in his blog.”

Of course, when I get famous as a musician, the reviews will be different:

“Where are the lyrics? Where are the motivations? Why does he hold back and not bare his soul to the world more often, instead of reviewing news and views held by other people? When an artist such as this chooses to represent himself in a blog, should he not be as emotionally captivating as he is on stage? He apparently doesn’t think so.”

Maybe fame as a geologist?:

“If you have interest in people and the randomness of life, this blog will keep you somewhat entertained, but if you visit the site in order to hear the ideas of tomorrow given first form, you will be saly disappointed, as science is rarely the topic and geology less so.”

And, of course, psychologists would have little use for me, no matter how famous I end up in other fields:

“It is sad to say that such a great figure in modern history, culture and spirituality has so little formal schooling in modern psychology that he disbelieves, on principal, everything that Freud ever said.”

ENN: Environmental News Network [[Affiliate News 813]]

Coral sex! Yeah!

“VIRGINIA KEY, Fla. — In the Florida Keys, the August full moon represents a unique and precious event: annual coral spawning for some of the most threatened corals in the world.

This year, like many others, researchers from the University of Miami Rosenstiel School and University of North Carolina Wilmington will spend the latter part of August and early September studying the phenomenon in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary to understand how humans can improve the plight of elkhorn, staghorn, boulder star and other species of corals.”

Full story: