Category Archives: Scribbles

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968

Posted on January 15, 2007 | Comments Off on Martin Luther King, Jr., 1929-1968

When I was fourteen, in 1958, my father and I rode a train to Mississippi and stopped at a depot near the little county seat where he grew up. I can still hear him shouting at the elderly black porter as we got down: "Boy! Boy!" And I still see the old man shuffling towards us to carry our bags. Today, practically every public office in that town is held by a black person. Courtesy and a lot more besides also has changed since Dr. King said these words the day before he was assassinated:

"Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

Via Power Line 

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Posted in Blogosphere, Scribbles

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And you thought the mullahs were loonies

Posted on January 15, 2007 | Comments Off on And you thought the mullahs were loonies

The letter X could be banned in Saudi Arabia because it too closely resembles that hated symbol, the Christian cross:

"In a kingdom where Friday preachers routinely refer to Christians as pigs and infidel crusaders, even a twisted cross ranks as an abomination."

Quick, someone alert the Carter Center, which derives a good chunk of its funding from the Saudis. Charming people, the oil ticks. Don’t you just love lining their pockets every time you fill up with gas?

Via Power Line 

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Water intoxication

Posted on January 15, 2007 | Comments Off on Water intoxication

A young mother in California is dead from water intoxication in a radio station’s competition trying to win a Nintendo Wii video game system for her children. This caught my eye because I’m back on the induction phase of the Atkins diet, which means drinking about 80 ounces of water a day. The difference is I take time to urinate and that was exactly what the competition specified you could not do, while drinking quarts of water. Somebody’s going to be sued, according to the science blog Respectful Insolence:

"Allthough I do not discount individual responsibility, most people are ignorant of how little it can take to cause water intoxication. It is not stated whether (1) contestants were warned that they could die from drinking too much water too fast or (2) qualified medical personnel were present to monitor the contest. In addition, it doesn’t say whether the radio station had vetted its idea with a physician. I doubt that it did, because any competent physician would have told the organizers that this contest was a very bad idea and dangerous, to boot."

Some doctors also think the Atkins diet is dangerous, but I have not found it so. YMMV.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Science/Engineering, Scribbles

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Chet Baker sings

Posted on January 12, 2007 | Comments Off on Chet Baker sings

And also plays the flugelhorn, at the link, although how he does it with missing front teeth I, an old trumpet player, will never understand. Perhaps the wider mouthpiece of the flugelhorn. This must be from after his alleged beating in San Francisco in 1966 in a drug deal gone bad, in which some of his front teeth were knocked out. Many moons ago, circa 1963, I saw him (to the extent one could see anything) in a very smokey cafe in Paris. He was a muscial legend then, and still is, almost twenty years after his death in a fall from a hotel in Amsterdam, it says here. Watch and listen, though you may have to fiddle with the thing to see/hear it all. Worth the trouble.

Via But I’m A Liberal 

Or, if you prefer, a little big band from Maynard Ferguson, also on flugelhorn, via Mystic Chords. 

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Bush Library furor

Posted on January 10, 2007 | Comments Off on Bush Library furor

A really amusing battle is going on at Southern Methodist University in Dallas where the Bush haters in the faculty are raging about losing their alleged academic independence from politics (oh, come on) if SMU hosts W’s presidential library–as if all presidential libraries are not partisan, at least until the great man dies. Poor Laura, it’s only because SMU is her alma mater that Bush wanted the library there to begin with. It would be much better served at Baylor University in Waco where Bush Derangement Syndrome is not so pronounced. But the library’s alleged partisanship that the SMU faculty purports to be concerned about really is baloney. The LBJ Library in Austin is hardly a hotbed of conservative analysis and Stanford University hasn’t been noticeably jeopardized by the presence of the conservative Hoover Institution. In any case, one would not expect, as one commenter here asserts, to see a bi-partisan exhibit at Clinton’s library dedicated to Monica Lewinsky, not as long as Old Bill is alive.

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Posted in Scribbles, Texana, The War

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Those dead birds

Posted on January 8, 2007 | Comments Off on Those dead birds

My guess is the 63 dead birds found in downtown Austin today–shutting down business for hours and getting top billing on CNN for fears of  what? terrorism?–were poisoned by some office worker or building manager fed up with the flocks of grackles that have taken over down there. Loud, dirty, etc. Here in the People’s Republic, resolving things like that requires many public meetings, protest demos, law suits, etc. So–my guess–someone took the quickie way out and laid out some posion pellets on the window ledges and succeeded in killing a bunch of pigeons and sparrows as well as their grackle target. Whatever, the local daily is on the case.

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Wrap rage

Posted on January 6, 2007 | Comments Off on Wrap rage

Around here we joke that you need a nuclear bomb to get the packaging open on just about everything sold in America these days. Mr. Boy can’t even open his fruit snacks and fruit leather plastic wrappings with his fingers, nor can I. You need a ballpoint pen to puncture them first. As for the "clam shell" plastic covering on stuff from toys to printer ink cartridges, with their sharp edges, it takes a pair of scissors and infinite care not to wind up bleeding all over the product.

Indeed, "according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, injuries from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 visits to emergency rooms in 2004," reported here, which includes claims from some packagers that they plan to soon start making it easier to open the clam shells. We’ll believe that when we see it.

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Posted in Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles

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