Let Mr. Bigglesworth do his business, or kick him off the kitty litter

[Okay, back by popular demand, a post that I deleted because I was thinking it had no point and was too cutesy. But at the very least I got my first hate mail from it from some anonymous punk, grammatically-challenged thirteen year old: "wut kind of shit blog is this...IT SUX..just understand tht ur not a good blogger...."]

A week or two ago I saw an SUV with a custom license plate reading "ARFNMOW". Yes, a 50-something woman expressing with sheer onomatopoeic brilliance her love for mangy mutts and frisky felines.

Seeing as there's not enough controversy in this blog, it's time for me to take a stand. Stop pretending people that you can be a cat and dog person and like them equally! You have to take a side! Arf n' mow, ain't no how. Just who is man's best friend?

And I'm all for the dogs. I am for Benji, Lassie, and Marmaduke. Fido semper fidelis! Hey, I'm the first to cringe when an overzealous dog lover doesn't seem to account for where their dog's tongue has been before they let it get to what amounts to first base on their cheek. And there are certain aggressive breeds that belong in a zoo.

But I'm sorry, for all dogged-doggy faults, I'm convinced that most cats fit the clinical description of psychopath. The cold, calculating SOBs (although I guess strictly speaking, I could only call a dog a SOB). Yeah, okay, they're cute as a kitten as kittens, but that's just their MO to enslave humans.

Okay, well then, I just wouldn't want it be said that I missed the personal website cliche of discussing pets and other highly interesting themes.

What's up my Ho Mei?

On Sunday, I drove to the Denver Botanic Gardens for a Chile Festival (good Mexican food, Mariachi music and run-of-the mill art for sale), and going to the offsite parkin' I passed a restaurant sign I had noticed once before on Colfax Avenue: "Ho Mei Chinese Restaurant." This got me thinking about two things, what in the hell does "Ho Mei" mean in Chinese, and secondarily, I wondered if there was a Mandarin speaking rapper out there called "Ho Mei" just so he could call his groupies "Mei Hoes."

To answer this most essential of questions, I decided to take a basic Mandarin class yesterday at the last moment. And it's a blast! I have tired of listening to "Kookooey en la mañana" during the morning commute, so it is an ideal time to listen to language tapes and make my fellow commuters keep their tailgating distance from the guy who's talking to himself and making funny facial contortions to get the right intonation of "I'm an american, do you like to play parcheesi?"

Yeah, it will take a lot of work to make this a useful skill and not a game, but already with the literal handful of words and phrases we've learned in class, it's interesting to start to understand the imprints on the speech patterns of non-native English speakers from the grammatical and phonetical structure of Mandarin.

To take another example of this, I notice a common error I make in Spanish is saying "I have lived here for five years," when the perfect (have + participle) is not used to express a duration of time, while "I have lived here," is grammatically correct if it expresses the idea of completed action. Vice versa, when you hear a native Spanish speaker say, "I work here for three years" this reflects the use of the present tense in Spanish to express the same idea.

So far, in seeing that many constructs in Chinese such as the very name of the language itself, HanYu are formed of two nouns Han (a river, a dynasty, a people) and Yu (language), it starts to make sense when you hear a native Chinese speaker make an error in combining in English what are two nouns in a case where a native English speaker would use an adjective and noun combination. I'm not sure of the accuracy of my observations since the course material I have so far lacks rigorous grammatical background.

Well, just four more of these classes to test drive, and I'll probably look into more instruction if I continue to enjoy learning it.

Mundo-Cool

Google Earth

A New Editoral Art Form?

I was reading the debunking site Snopes, when I came across a photoshopped editorial directed at W. Bush's vacationing ways.

Now, I don't think that this is particularly spectacular, but I do think it would be cool if someone who was good at photoshop could create a syndicated photo editorial day after day, so that it would be a pastiche photo, placed in the editorial page of a newspaper. Hell, maybe someone is doing it now.

Bummer Consolation Prize

Another ocean dream. I was on the beach...(apparently both my walking and sleeping dreams start there)...and I remembered feeling indignant that the Atlantic looked like New Orlean's flood waters instead of the translucent green promised by the brochures. Sorry folks, I guess my dreams don't often have plots.

I booked a flight to Cancun late last night so I have something to look forward to in November, after my not-so-carefully laid plans have been laid waste. I'm hoping to see my first extensive coral reefs and depending on whether it's recommendable for a novice, try cave diving in a cenote.

I've been a hypocritical bum lately, being productive at work and expanding skill sets and doing everything else that people theoretically do according to their resumes. Fear not, no matter the feats of dilligence, I still harbor in my soul a desire to make the puritans and their work ethic go apopletic. Bwahaha, I may even make my work fun - then there will be no stopping my plot.

A Texas Flashback to a Debate on Nanomachine Infestations

[Gianttexas shaped vortex opens. Usual flashback harpsichord music replaced with steel geee-tar.]

The year is 1999. (Yes folks, as you must be wondering somehow I manage to have the same haircut I've had for the past 20 years, just look twenty times nerdier with glasses.) I'm at a speaking event at the University of Texas at Arlington sponsored by a Christian group on campus, hosting Michael Behe, biochemist and author of "Darwin's Black Box." Behe is a populizer of the intelligent design movement that this year has been proclaimed a scientific theory meriting equal time in the science classroom according to the current Señor Presidente.

One of the planks of Behe's design hypothesis is irreducible complexity, for which he cites the example of a mouse trap, which if lacking any one part has no partial function that he can see that would allow a stepwise evolutionary progression. Note that Behe does not deny that evolution happened, he just thinks it's insufficient to account for the biological world we see today (and in some sense there is still the separate question of biogenesis, the transition from non-life to primitive life).

In "Darwin's Black Box" he cites examples of biological machines at the cellular level as being evidence for irreducibly complex features in nature. In particular, he mentioned the "motors" of bacteria as being irreducibly complex.

When I had an opportunity to ask a question to Behe, my (leading?) question was something like as follows: "You mention that bacteria have signs of intelligent design, but in the case of a bacterium like the organism that causes leprosy, what do you think the purpose of the design is?" Since it was more a comment then a question because it makes me nervous to speak in public unless I get fired up and in no mood to listen (which I was at that point), hopefully I'm not being unfair to say that the gist of his response was that he didn't know and that it was a philosophical question.

Hmmm....I've heard of philosophical questions before. It’s funny how much those philosophical questions have to an unbelievable extent also become part of the purview of science. Democritus may have speculated about the fabric of the universe while chowing down on a gyro and reading the latest tablet edition of "Air, Fire, Water, Earth Digest", but these days the most productive speculations come from those having an atom-smashing good time.

In his book, Behe mentions that space aliens could be the intelligent designers, and that his theory was agnostic about the designer(s), and yet he wasn't speaking amongst a group of UFO enthusiasts as far as I could tell (perhaps on another occasion). This cordoning off the identity of a designer or designers seems a bit artificial. Forensic science is dedicated to discovering and proving unknown actors, why wouldn't Intelligent Design, if it was capable of progressing also start to investigate the identity of the intelligence behind the design? The only reason I can see is if they are trying to solve the mystery backwards.

Is it so far fetched to try to divine the purpose something was created for, from the design? I mean imagine the parallel Care Bear universe, where all is sunshine and rainbows, and everything about it is oh-so huggable. Aww shucks. We can't try to intuit the purpose in the design? That it was designed by a ten-year old girl?

The beauty of nature is cited as evidence of providence by any number of religions. Yep, sure is. But when you've watched enough NatGeo specials, I personally want to see if there's any cosmic humane society I can call. And when I heard about that fish in the Amazon that usually burrows in the gills of other fish, but sometimes mis-navigates into the human urethra...well, there must be something to that evolutionary struggle to pass on the genes, because my first instinct was to immediately take the family jewels' defensive position, in case one of those Bobbit-monsters managed to migrate six thousand miles to Colorado.

Folks, I could be wrong, so the debate in my head and out of it continues, but what I see right now is a four-billion year old arms race. This isn't Gaia, species get vanquished and are no more, unless all dinosaurs go to heaven.

Fortune Cookie Monster -- "Me Want See All"

"This person is serious and true and deserves to be respected."

There you have it. My fortune cookie today is of the affirmational sort, no hint of things to come. Maybe the fortune writer was feeling less sanguine about his powers of prognostication, as he didn't include the lotto numbers on the obverse side this time.

So, let's see, if I could pick my own fortune cookie right now:

"You will find out soon whether you are the proud owner of a $1000 T-Shirt bought from the federaligubment, or if you will journey to a far land."

(After getting poked, prodded, and wearing "the gown" for the med tests, they sent me a Peace Corps T. I sent in my appeal last week, so I expect to find out in a month or two how it fares.)

Well, as they say. One door closes, and you say "#*&$** it, open that door! I'm not kidding!"

Or maybe it was another door opening. I forget.

Plan B is to telecommute from the Caribbean, which surprisingly is entering the realm of possibility, depending on how much I increase my expertise in the next four to six months. My thought is that I don't need to choose between work and travel when I have a job that lends itself to being done any where with an internet connection.

Plan C teach English in Japan or elsewhere in Asia...

Plan D...

Ah there's plans and what happens, I just want to take the more adventuresome path. Because me love cookies.

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Update (9/3): Well my impatience is rewarded, the Peace Corps at least didn't keep me waiting another two months. Appeal denied.