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I don't initiate Hangouts, but will attend if invited.
2 out of 8 (1 1/2?) ain't bad. I said before that Louisville and AZ were gimmes--lo and behold, except that's KY what beat Louisville. Close enough (that's a state that has had consistently strong teams either way). Dayton, I'll have to say, was a surprise, as was Florida, who exhibited an extraordinary push. If they pull that off again, Dayton goes bye-bye. That's a big IF, though. Even pro teams fresh off of a glorious win have come to the next game unable to make that proverbial change for a dollar. We'll see. Not surprised about Purdue, Mr. President. :P
MSU, UConn---I don't care what the seeds say, it's a toss-up. It'll also be a toss-up if the last two teams standing are KY and AZ, and those two look like the strongest in all brackets. Those should be outstanding games to watch in any case.
GO CATS!
Well, so much for the AZ Cats. But hey--KY are Cats, too. :P
NCAA UPDATE: Kentucky in some form is usually a gimme, like I said. Wolverines look a lot better than expected, I gotta say. Those treys were awesome...but so was that offensive rebound action. Damn nail-biter, this.
....AND THE CATS GO TO THE FOUR. There ya go.
==========Nevermind. UConn whupped 'em. I know. Nobody saw that comin'=====
Yeahhhh don't gimme grief about how time travelers are supposed to already know how stuff is supposed to happen. There's a universe where they won and there's a universe where they didn't win, and the universe that reads this blog isn't the universe where the Cats won. But that's why future travel is for advanced students only--it does necessarily involve inter-universe travel as well, and the risk is high for any lesser student to get caught in a pocket. Besides, the level of mathematics at this point in time isn't adequate for that sort of thing either--current level of science is once again limited by its interpretation of the zero, and this has happened before in the past when it was invented in the first place. The zero is a very important concept in math, and it will determine not only the ability to progress, but it also sets limits (see also calculus).
Whovians, please revisit The Rings of Akhaten and note the number of mathematical errors committed therein, specifically the ones that occur during the end of the story, as part/parcel of how it's resolved. The future that was supposedly supposed to have happened but did not does not have an infinite future, sorry.
"What should have been" is in a different universe than that one, and even so, it's still not infinite. Please--who else would know better than the original Clara the Impossible Person, yea? I didn't mention the genius thing, yea? I didn't really need to, yea? ^_^
As MH Flight 370 and Ukraine go wall-to-wall on U.S. media, events in Egypt have been mentioned in passing. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, big-deals the situation as it still has issues with Egypt arresting its journalists on the charge of associations with the Islamic Brotherhood, and Qatar, the home base and, frankly, the controlling interest of Al Jazeera, doesn't exactly have clean hands itself. I remain amazed at all the high-profile U.S. journalists who went aboard the Al Jaz ship, apparently figuring that it was no worse than working for the state-run BBC either.
Ummmm, not quite right, I'm afraid.
I'm no fan of the Islamic Brotherhood, but I'm particularly worried about my Egyptian friend who was, and who also was working for Radio Cairo when I stopped hearing from her. I have to say I'm no big fan of a military-run government either. From my perspective, Egypt is now embroiled in the worst of all worlds, and as somebody who has been a fan of Radio Cairo since the late 1960's, this really really really pains me a great deal.
But, viewed another way, the riots engaged in by the Brotherhood basically handed the military an excuse for its ruling, that, when read in full, the death sentences were meted out as a consequence of the riots that took place when Morsi was taken out of power for the abuses he committed, and a lot of people died in those riots, and because of the actions of both the military and the Brotherhood.
This is no way to run a government by elected people on behalf of all the nation's people. There are no clean hands here.
Coincidentally, Jimmy Carter is making the press rounds about violence committed against women, but is he addressing domestic violence here in the States? No. He's concerning himself with human trafficking, of females, even girls, and the tribal practice of "female circumcision" which he calls "cutting". It's been brought up as an issue before in challenging my friendship with Muslims, but it's these same people who do not have a grasp on the basic distinctions in Islamic law. Even if you disregard the differences of law between Shiites and Sunnis, it's important to understand that under either, Sharia law upholds tribal practice as legitimate Islam, and this cutting is a tribal practice, not a practice central to Islam, Shiite type or Sunni type.
Get it? Got it? Good.
How can a woman be in favor of the type of government that the Islamic Brotherhood trumpets when Islam is, in Western view, oppressive to women? I can understand it, and that's something that a lot of people don't understand about me either. You see, I don't pick and choose isolated incidents of history to make the case--I take it all in historical context, and that includes the validity of issues surrounding Ayisha. It's not like Christians never did such things at the time. They did, and worse. Deal with it.
Wednesday Egypt UPDATE: I just heard that Sisi resigned from the military so that he can run for president...and if he's elected, he's essentially Commander in Chief even though we're talking about the Egyptian Constitution, not the U.S. It remains to be seen if that's like electing Eisenhower to the presidency of the U.S. or if it's just another avenue for military rule. I remain skeptical. Fact remains that Sisi did what he did because of the non-military Egyptians who didn't like what Morsi did, and that includes those who voted for him. Now the Brotherhood prefers the current press characterization as "the opposition", I see. Here' s a reminder that not all "opposition" necessarily shares the view of the Brotherhood, but it's the Brotherhood making the most noise about it and it has a friendly press outlet in Al Jaz. Here come the weasel words.
This is no April Fool's joke--Egypt April UPDATE: I decided to check the Facebook status of Radio Cairo to North America and found that the last post she made was in January. April 1 is her birthday...
It's a florid story about a wedding, and she hasn't posted since, to this day April 1 2014. I do not Like that.
In other news, on Facebook Fred Waterer hosted an impromptu Radio Time Capsule, which (more typically) airs weekly (more or less) on webcaster Radio Scooter International, running some great stuff with Jack Benny and Mel Blanc, tonight. He closed the show with the usual signoff, which included The Good Night Song...and he sent me a file of it tonight but in doing so included a quotation well worth sharing with time travelers and historians alike...
Indeed. Veritas. Fred's show began on a Tuesday but has been most regular on Sundays, 9pm Eastern. Tonight's rendition was unscheduled, out of the blue, announced at basically the last minute by his FB posting.
By golly, just before closing down for the night, I even found the tune on YouTube. It's a lovely piece well worth sharing with everybody.
Good night everybody, everywhere.
Friday evening UPDATE: Bad news from Radio Scooter-land....
The older we get, the more we appreciate our aging peers...but...the more frequently we expect to hear news like this about or from our favorite people. Fred's no spring chicken, either. Hope he holds out til Bill gets back. Bill better be back. I hope.
Friday UPDATE 2: That's our Fred....
Yeah, that was the improptu show last time. Johnny Lightning, whom I may know? (upper right corner there). Indeed I do, from WBCQ, The Planet. I just dunno about being a FB Friend, though. ^_^
Monday April 14 UPDATE, up at the top, re: Title IX-- CSPAN3 is going to air a segment on the history of Title IX, and in this Update I will post other CSPAN3 links regarding that topic.
Yeah--in view of Women's History Month, in view of laws, it's worthwhile to check out the history of Title IX, isn't it. There was a lot of male piss-n-moan when that got passed, and then down the road we got the WNBA--which caused more piss-n-moan from the male peanut gallery. But we can thank Title IX for the fact that we can haz WNBA, and for the fact that despite all the pissery-moanery, we STILL have the WNBA long after the independent men's leagues (non-NBA) faded into the sunset.
Now, as to the brackets. I think Obama's a shrewd bracket picker (and no, time travel isn't going to help anybody succeed with bracket picking: as I said before, there is no such thing as predestination of the future; time is fractal, not linear, all you linear people who think otherwise). Sir Charles thinks he's hot stuff picking brackets, but he thought he was hot stuff as a forward, too--so much for Sir Charles, who thinks he's hot stuff no matter what.
Where I would depart from Obama's choices is that I think the Jayhawks are most likely to go to the Final Four, over Purdue. I also think that Arizona and Louisville are gimmes.
Now, let's see what actually transpires.
Sunday UPDATE: How about that rout by IA State, hm? If I was gambling, I would have bet on UNC myself...but I know better. People are STILL captains of their own fate, and the future is NOT pre-destination. Time is just as fractal in the future as it has been in the past. Seeds? I never have paid attention to those.
Monday UPDATE: Well, so much for the Jayhawks. :P
Monday UPDATE 2, Nate Silver Edition: I mentioned him before as someone who had a handle on time travel to the future, but a handle is all he has. That's all my TARDIS students have when they rely on mathematics alone, and it's why I mentioned in a previous post that getting a grasp on the principles until they are intuitive is the thing that's important. The future is not predestined--you cannot simply let stuff happen and figure that it was already carved in stone somewhere because the future is simply a reverse concept from what the past is. Not in the least, sorry. If Nate was using seed rankings in his mathematic models, he was doomed to failure from the start. When you're doing bracket predictions, keep in mind that you're predicting a future that people other than yourself are in control of, and you cannot predict the path of other people more accurately than you can for yourself.
Tuesday AM UPDATE: I might have been wrong about the Jayhawks, but I was certainly right about Purdue. Commencing to be half-smug for the rest of the day, although I know that the Purdue in question in this Update is Women's.
Friday UPDATE:***Unfrigginbelievable*** about Baylor and Stanford. But it's like I keep saying--there's no such thing as a certain future because there's no such thing as predestination. Imagine what sports would be like if all teams just sat back and let the future transpire according to what must be carved in stone to happen. Nah. The fixed point in time is the scheduled game. Where it goes from there are a number of fractal options in the progression. Deal with it. I hate to be the one to break the bad news to ESPN, but their faith in Nate Silver to prognosticate game outcomes is misplaced. Badly misplaced. Mathematics may look like wondrous magic to some, but it's nothing more than just another language whose business it is to express relationships between entities known and unknown. It expresses the relationships in a manner that lends itself to human analyses. Advanced mathematicians are only linguistic experts, able to read the relationships put before them using agreed-upon symbols. And that's all there is to it. Nothing and no one can predict which path will be taken progressing from a fixed point in time because there are many of them, and the failure of the human being to understand this is the fact that human beings persist in thinking in linear--even when there's nothing linear about it.
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Wow--within a space of a minute of posting the above, this blog got a lot of hits from the UK. I know that the Beeb got its knickers in a knot when I posted about Clara Oswald, and I'm sure that the latest outrage now is that I'm actually giving actual TARDIS flying lessons. Suck it, Brits--I know how a TARDIS works, I know how to operate a TARDIS, I happen to be the ORIGINAL Clara the Impossible Person, and I even know the Doctor's name, so THERE.
Very late Monday UPDATE: I noticed the hits on my old posts about Egypt in the blog stats today and yes, I did hear about the death sentences for many members of the Islamic Brotherhood. Yes, I am alarmed, particularly because of Egyptian friends who did express support for the Brotherhood, and who have gone silent online for what I think is too long. I have no further news on Egypt, unfortunately, and I do fear for my friends there. Do not construe this as any endorsement for the Brotherhood, though. It's just that I pass no judgment on friends that do and still consider military rule of any sort to be out of place in what's supposed to be a civilian government. Every military should be subservient to civil authorities.
The Michigan Area Radio Enthusiasts have been circulating some picture claiming that it's me and Marie Lamb wearing the latest radio head gear.
I wish.
I'm callin' you out on that, Zichi. WTF, man?
Copyright schmopyright, Ken--I'll have you know that "fiddlesticks" has the "look and feel" of a trademark I own, and that's FIDDLSDX. That's a club founded in 1978 by me, Carrie Ketchumal and Mao C. Gung Ho, a report of which was published, with permission, by the Review of International Broadcasting, buster.
{of course I'm laughing my arse off. It ain't often that a satire--me--of a satirist--Charlie Loudenboomer--gets satirized}
First, I'm going to do the serious thing and mention that I've noticed all the hits I've gotten on previous posts about Syria, Iran, an Iraqi family I was close to, and Egypt. Things have gone from bad to worse in all of those areas, with the possible exception of Iran which just stayed bad. I have chosen not to do daily updates on those and have chosen instead to blog about any sort of change in direction, when they occur, and so far, none has occurred to date. For a blow-by-blow update, your best bet is to stick with Twitter and Follow those people that I had previously recommended, and keep in mind that with regard to Egypt, Mona Eltahawy doesn't keep as close an eye on Egyptian affairs as one might prefer. Better: The Big Pharaoh and Ahram Online. The latter is good with following Syria and other Middle East affairs as well. For Arabic-speakers, Follow Sandmonkey. He'll Tweet in English sometimes, but usually in Arabic.
Another Google Plus community added my blog because of their interest in recipes and although I've resolved to post more the last time this happened, I haven't. I *will* get to that, and it's *definitely* on my To Do List. It's just that I've filed that under MaƱana Projects. A "movable feast", as it were. Just consider it to be inevitable.
Now, about my Irish...I've got one. Deal with it. My Celtic-extracted friends who tend to get offended by put-on Irish airs just for the occasion of St. Patrick's Day will just have to cringe again for the entire 24 hour period, because I have a legitimate license from a genuine Irish priest of Dublin to do what I do. Look at it this way--living in Oklahoma means that I've had to put up with 'way too many renditions of "Danny Boy", aka "Londonderry Air" and this is the one annual chance I get, to get even...with my version of "London Derriere".
According to the counsel of Padre Dave (Father David Rice, if you must know, formerly a professional photographer who performed my baptism in Guinness Stout--not the light stuff, mind you) "it's not a sin if you don't take pleasure in it". You can bet that St. Paddy's Day is when I sin like hell.
You might as well start bracing yourself now, cuz I'm on a tear the whole weekend. Let the blarney begin.
But first....Shortwave Shindig, aka Shortwave Winterfest in PA. A lovely worldwide adventure it is, too. Pointed my browser to one of the links they mentioned and found an archive of Radio Gallifrey Intergalactic. Wonderful!!
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Ah--good question. If Padre Dave was properly a native of Ireland, why is he Padre? Well, that's because his Irish was bigger than his priesthood.
Huh?
It's like this--he had a thing for a gal whom I'll just call Lucia, and he wasn't all that discreet about it. Basically, didn't care who in the apartment complex (well, it was a converted off-campus dorm, actually) knew it. That's why we all called him Padre Dave. Fondly. Lucia's Mexican.
Padre Dave, if you're still with us, I'd like to hear from you. Same goes for everybody who was there at Saluki Arms at the time.
But on the 18th, Elvish will have left the building.
Sunday footnote-- #Egypt: 60 Minutes aired (re-aired) its segment about Bassem Youssef, "the Jon Stewart of Egypt" and it appears that he keeps going on and off the air there. More's the pity. But I also notice the absence of my pro-Muslim Brotherhood friends on Facebook, too. None of these developments are to be celebrated.
#Iraq recently passed a law permitting marriage to 9 year old girls. Everybody else is shocked and I'm wondering what took 'em so long...because I know this to be The Ayisha Standard. But Shiites don't recognize Ayisha as significant as Sunnis do. Saddam's Ba'athists were too secular to permit it, apparently, and what amazes me, really, is that the Shia majority thinks that's a good idea. That's a Sunni thing. My guess is that it's an effort to placate the Sunni radicals that keep up the suicide bombing incidents going over there.
For those unfamiliar with Islam's two factions and the role Ayisha plays in the difference, I will post more, but not tonight; it's to late for that at the moment. G'night everybody!
Those of us who remember Dan Robinson as just another fellow DX radio hobbyist were always quite proud of him making it into the staff of the Voice of America. But now he's not just retiring--he's fed up, according to what's been reported by BBG Watch.
This is just as big a deal, if not bigger, than the death of Don Jensen. The radio world just isn't going to be the same after this. Tuesday UPDATE: World Science U finally put some classes online--had to register first, though. As I mentioned before, I intended to sign up for the time-space class and sorta did so at this point. There are two of them: non-mathematic and mathematic, which states that only high-school level of mathematics are required.
The math class.
The mathless version.
I registered for the math version, but after seeing that nonsense about the speed of light explanation on the Colbert Report, I'm tempted to register for both.
In any case....here we go, friends n neighbors....
Despite the Oscars it won, the movie "12 Years a Slave" still hasn't shown even once in Enid, Oklahoma. Therefore I made a trip to Oklahoma City to see it; the first time it ran in OKC, it was hard to catch. Now that I finally (***FINALLY!!!***) got to see the film, I can say that it earned every Oscar it got, "The Butler" notwithstanding...and I can add that it's high damn time that this country got honest about history that actually happened, Enid Oklahoma in particular.
My regular readers will have gathered by now that I do have something of a background in law, although I wouldn't grade that background as anything greater than that of, say, a paralegal, just because I know my way around a law library. When one delves into the U. S. Office of Patents and Trademarks, the law (even copyright law, as this office covers the differences among the 3 types) is a little hard to avoid...but that's just for starters.
With that, I'll don my legal beagle hat and address the SCOTUS case of Fernandez vs California which has sparked some controversy on the web today. Searching a house without a search warrant was the battle cry today, decrying another apparent assault on the U. S. Constitution.
Not so fast--the U. S. Constitution mentions this thing called Probable Cause. When a police officer has ample probable cause as he did in this case, no warrant is required even under the U. S. Constitution. The SCOTUS ruling changed nothing.
And now I'll address what I'm sure some of you thought was a peculiar statement on my part in another post about how the U. S. Office of Patents and Trademarks cover copyright law. Well, it does in terms of what can or cannot be patented or trademarked and is more appropriate as a copyright...also cases in which a patent was claimed but the judge ruled that the thing wasn't covered by patent but by copyright law (most infamous case of that was Apple Inc vs. Microsoft over Microsoft's absconding with Apple's operating system and then calling it "Windows". That was a ruling that basically changed the tech world, and for the worse in my opinion). So yeah--you can find copyright law in a patents and trademarks office.
First of all, thank you to those on Google Plus that found my recipes interesting enough for my blog to be added to your Circles. The snag with that, though, is that I don't post recipes frequently enough for that level of attention. But now that you've Added me, I'll see if I can do a better job of that.
Second of all, in the late evening hours I spent on Facebook, I was complimented by a speaker of English, Arabic, French and German on my simple statement "Laissez les bon temps rouler!" as being good French. Ya, this person wasn't aware that this was a typical Mardi Gras/New Orleans quip, and when I attempted some German in the form of "Eins Zwei, FĆ¼r, Die Musik Nicht Nein Bier!", the joke wasn't gotten that time either.
It was one of my Muslim friends who initiated a brief conversation with me in French, and then in private message, attempted to debate religion with me, which was very interesting indeed. As was often the case in past debates with Muslims, the Muslim didn't identify himself as being either Shiite or Sunni (not surprising--each regards the other as heretical and as good as nonexistent). I was asked if I read the Quran and was it convincing, do I believe? I said yes, no, no.
The person then asked if he could describe something miraculous? I said, sure. He said that every time he hears the recitation of the Quran, he finds it soothing. I responded that I sometimes tune in the Quran recitation on the radio and find it soothing, too, but I didn't understand one word of the recitation. I added that because I'm an atheist, I am in a position to disbelieve the lies that Christians have been telling about Islam and that there have been a number of occasions where I find myself in the peculiar position as being an atheist actually defending Islam against the things that Christians say which are not true.
As the discussion progressed, he attempted to school me on Islam and I pointed out that I'm very familiar with Islam and even know how the Shiite-Sunni rift came about. And that's when things 'way got more interesting.
He went on about having nothing against the Shia, the Quran is what it is, and even said I didn't have to pay attention to hadiths after I mentioned the known problems and differences with those...and observed that he spoke like a Sunni. He then admitted that he was. I mentioned that among Sunnis, the Wahabs were a problem and he commenced to defend the purity of the Wahabs and Salafists in one breath...so I'm wondering to myself how a Salafist of all people would take the obvious contradiction of an atheist defender of Islam. Whoa.
But that is the crux of how I'm able to get along well with my Muslim friends--they know that being what I am also means that I don't buy the crap that's being sold about them...but I haven't mentioned being a time traveler who has gone through all the trouble it takes to sort all of that out. I don't think any of them are ready for that.
Well, an attempt to convert me to Islam ensued, thus the evangelism part. It's clear that Salafist Sunnis don't believe the old Muslim adage about how only Allah can make a convert. We closed the evening with a resolution to resume the debate later. I'm looking forward to that.
In more serious news, there's the development regarding Qatar's alleged involvement in internal meddling. This is a charge we've heard before when Al Jazeera tried to raise alarm about the capture of its journalists in Egypt, except that the meddling charge rose to the extent of charges of allegedly joining a terrorist organization in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. The western journalists who have joined Al Jazeera say, to a man, that it's for the sake of journalism that they've joined, but as long as Al Jazeera is an organ of the state of Qatar, that will never be the case. And now we see further fragmentation in the Muslim world and it's all about Qatar at the crux of it. Others may be surprised, but I'm not.
Some stunning news in the shortwave world this evening: Marie Lamb is pulling the plug on Cumbre DX as it airs on the radio. It'll still be on Facebook and elsewhere online. Still, shortwave radio isn't going to be the same. And it just occurs to me that World of Radio's Glenn Hauser is no spring chicken himself. That program has gotta end some time. When those two programs go kaput, there's gonna be a huge vacuum left in the shortwave universe. Yikes.
Other Facebook memes I can really really really relate to...
...and when ya find that one guy who actually can, ya hang onto 'im. Gettin' that lucky more than once just ain't bloody likely.
I'm posting this right after posting a few Louisiana-referent YouTube vids on Facebook, in honor of MARDI GRAS and wotthehell wotthehell (as Mehitabel used to say) I'll just post some of that here. I already posted Carpenter's "Down At The Twist And Shout" (which I don't mind playing a bazillion times, but you might) and so I'll kick things off here with a Jerry Reed suite which includes the mandatory Amos Moses.
As I've mentioned in previous posts about the TPP and other trade arrangements, the current situation in Ukraine poses to disrupt current trade agreements as well as prospective ones.
Europe and the West might very well have an interest in encouraging Ukraine's western half to stick with its inclinations toward western alliances, but Crimea's half clearly has in interest in the unity of Ukraine rather than its prospective balkanization. Similarly lies Russia's interest, and the thing that makes this even more interesting is the emergence of that good-ole-days bunch of oldsters who believe that the Soviets will rise again, in the form of the military retired that occupy the Crimean half. And there's the matter of access to the warm-water port--there's that.
Yeah, Russia has its own version of "the south's gonna rise again" Civil War "historians"/re-enactors in the form of old Soviets, and my buddy in St. Petersburg, gri, has stood as posterboy for that. When I find some of that pro-Soviet poetry that was posted on his old site (okay, so he's had several of them, and been banned from each one, but when I used to run Hypercrites.org, I cross-posted them there, and so whereas I still have a copy of the old Hypercrites database, I still have a copy of those poems).
Every generation arises the question as to whether or not we should still cling to the past or move ahead with modernization including the modernization of attitudes toward old enmities. The young usually find such things as the requirement that Turkey acknowledge the Armenian Massacre as a condition for joining the EU trade group as utter nonsense. And yet when one regards the southeast Asia situation where China's tradition was to be anti-western and what used to be French Indochina, plus Japan tended to be western allies, one finds old bugbears like the old Japanese imperialism along with all those atrocities surfacing as barriers to actual alliance between, say, Japan and S. Korea, even in matters of ASEAN and TPP.
But S. Korea's looking at a hostile N. Korea and its ally, China, which makes its cling to history something of an unaffordable luxury, and perhaps it also causes China to pause, too, because it's more interested in trade than in conflict. Or is it? Aye, therein lies the rub.
The Ukraine affair has managed to push Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Israel, etc. completely off the news map. But they're still there, as is the turmoil that continues in Venezuela and Brazil (nothing--but NOTHING!--gets in the way of Carnival!), also affected by the prospects of the TPP even though Brazil in particular isn't a prospective party to that agreement. Win or lose, none of these trade agreement outcomes is going to evolve into something that the crafters of those agreements had in mind when they first thought they were good ideas.
(Another alarming development re: Israel)
Ummmmm....no. I do NOT give a snit who wins an Oscar.
Another good Facebook meme is making the rounds today. Veritas and a half!
...and in Enid News, two different editors put the same story in two different sections of the Sunday paper. It was an AP story about a Christian break-away from the Boy Scouts for the purpose of excluding gays. The bright side is that though the Boy Scouts have a national charter they have no business having, the new group does not.
One of the articles had a paragraph cut out of it at the end, and the other one didn't. Go figure.
Here's a glimpse of the Son of Snowmageddon in my neck of the woods, but I'm sure most of the nation is looking at nearly the same thing right now...
The temperature gauge says it's 9 degrees F outside, too. Brrrrr.
People who missed out on Fred Waterer's Radio Time Capsule on Facebook missed out on (among other gems) THIS. Enjoy. :)
...Yeah, I tried to embed that on this page and it was a refusenik. I found a different posting of the same thing, and that's what's next...
MONDAY MIN-UPDATE: I made an attempt to locate my favorite Russian, gri, to see if he managed to re-establish his SMF board on DotTK yet again, or elsewhere. Nope. Found him on other people's SMF boards, though, but that's not unusual. His usual is to register and get banned within just a few postings:
Yup, that's my gri. He's not banned on Boyah, but he's still not accommodated there, either, and he's avoided it, on and off. I'm still going over the Hypercrites database to locate that Soviet poetry that I know I have in there somewhere...but know ye that it will be posted in its original Russian, and leave it to you to hit the Translate button on this blog, with the caveat that you shouldn't expect smooth English from it. Just do your best.
Trust me--that ain't even the half of it, ha.
Well, I've checked a number of Hypercrites database backups and I haven't found gri's stuff yet. It'll be awhile. As to the Debate Both Sides logo--that's the board which sprang from Arianna Online, when Arianna Huffington launched Huffington Post and said we couldn't use her name on the board anymore. There's ya a bit of HuffPo history trivia.
TPP development---not good. Obama appoints SOPA lobbyist.
A rather accurate meme appeared on Facebook today. Yup, that's me alright...
UPDATE 2: Speak of the devil and in he walks.
Just as I was making my final Internet rounds before closing down for the day, I checks me emails and espy this:
HE'S ALIVE!!!!!! lol.
Guess I'm gonna have to go pay Boyah a visit, ha.
...and I'm back. In his tagline, he indicates that his account has been suspended (at Dot TK--what, AGAIN?! lol ) and he's continuing to grouse about the li'l gizmo that detects a person's operating system. He's got no where else to go, apparently. Welcome back, gri!
That pic at the bottom is the quintessential Clarakeet.
I'm sure that the following pic will show something that might alarm my readers...
...I actually understand what gri said. This is actually a request to translate gri-ese into English. And I actually know how do that.
Thursday UPDATE: I found the Soviet poetry but found that the original Cyrillic in UTF-8 code didn't make the translation into other text format, so that's lost unless and until gri gets his website up, this time (I guess) on notpublic.tk. Here's the Babelfish translation of one poem I found...
FINE WINTER SOLDIERS
Where are you now, lightning-children, Who swore to their homeland? No debt is higher in those years, What to save our house from the "beasts".
Get up there fine soldiers! Put on his overcoat and all fall into line! All labor grandparents sailed into kickbacks, Wave your same club together!
Get up there our commanders, Arise farmer and blacksmith, It's time we all wear uniforms, Patience came to an end.
Get up there the soldiers of the Soviets! And the general and a soldier, Does not need any answers ... It is time to give battle to the thieves!
Wake up the queen of the field; Wake up from hibernation KGBist, Crushed the enemy neustavaya, And whether the people is clear.
And you, the student has already awakened? The hour has come to think a head, Diploma for taking bribes yours is not needed Take the cloak and silently in the system!
There is no higher honor for a soldier What Loyalty Oath to save, Now only the roar of the machine, Help clean up this honor.
