Clearly worried about becoming someone's bitch, convicted Enron founder Ken Lay decided to die to avoid prison. Perhaps we will see nigerian email scam letters from Mrs. Lay in the near future.
[wik] Geeklethal reminds me that that's "Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison."
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I was going to post something more today. But I have opted not to. The reason being, I am exhausted from my trip out to Ohio and back. The trip was fine, saw family, blah blah blah. But the weather was hot, humid, and I spent the majority of the weekend damp or wet. And the air conditioning on the bucketmobile went out. And the journey home was made more stressful by virtue of the fact that I nearly rammed a cop on an exit ramp. Thankfully, he was alert and paying attention, and honked in time to avoid a collision. I was issued a warning, which was altogether fair. Having kids in the car helps you look more like a responsible adult who lost it for a moment, rather than an idiot who deserves a reckless driving citation. Then, continuing cop night for the buckethead clan, my Sir John-of-the-sudden-emesis woke from a deep sleep and began puking all over the interior of the unairconditioned bucketmobile. Fearing worse to come, we pulled to the side of the road to deal with the vomit crisis. Following their long an honorable tradition of appearing when they're not needed, a cop pulled up behind us, lights flashing, to insure that we weren't doing anyting nefarious. No officer, just squeegeeing the vomit off my son. We'll be fine, really. Do you have any napkins?
Despite all of that, one highlight of the trip was Mrs. Buckethead and I taking turns reading to each other. We'd never done that before. It is a truly excellent way to pass the time. The book we chose was Before the Dawn, by Nicholas Wade. So far, a fascinating story - how new genetics research is shedding light on the murky prehistory of our race. For example, did you know that the entire human population outside Africa is descended from a mere 150 people? One band of early humans snuck out of Africa, fought lions and tigers and bears - and neanderthals - and laid claim to a planet. How cool is that? I recommend it highly. While you're at it, I also recommend Charles Stross' new one, Glasshouse. Better written than Accelerando, if slightly toned down on the speculation. Excellent read.
But now, I must nap.
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The Ministry has never believed in beating a dead horse. We are, however, all for beating mostly dead horses. Therefore, we bring you discarded mottoes for the moderately good state of Connecticut:
- Like Massachusetts, only dirtier and with less character
- Come for the scenery, stay to stalk Letterman
- Wedged into the armpit of New England
- New York City's other Suburb
- The second "C" is Silent, Casshole!
- Way too close to New York
- Home of Joe Lieberman
- Like Massachusetts, Only The Kennedy’s Don’t Own It - Yet
- In Texas, we'd be a county
- The state you can cross in 15 minutes ... on foot
- Nothing important has happened here since King Philip's War
- We're the Constitution State and we have no idea why
- At least we're not New Jersey
- We could kick Rhode Island's ass
- We'd really like to be part of France
[wik] Bonus slogans!
- The Home of Mark Twain. Oh, Missouri too I guess
- The Nutmeg State - whateverthefuck THAT's supposed to mean
- Home of the 4th-Farthest-North Located Ikea in the Continental US
- We Celebrate Diversity- ALL Are Welcome to do Our Landscaping
- Where News from Puerto Rico is Considered 'Local'
- We'd All Be Better Off as Far From Massachusetts as Possible
- The Elite-School-in-the-Ghetto State
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The Ministry would like everyone to have a happy, explosive filled, and thunderstorm-free Independence Day. If you are in Ohio, achieving this will be rather difficult, as the last two options are nigh on to unachievable thanks to the vagaries of weather and an Ohio's nanny-minded legislature. The only legal fireworks in my homestate are now, sadly, smoke bombs and sparklers. Sad. The day we celebrate our independence, we are not free to buy rockets and explosives to celebrate. A small lesson that we should take to heart is that independence and freedom are not the same. Perhaps we should institute a Liberty and Freedom day, to drive home the point.
In the meantime, though, celebrate America's independence as best you can, wherever you are. And next year, the Buckethead will remember to stop in somewhere truly freedom loving, like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, to buy lots of fireworks before getting to Ohio. In this way, he will bring joy to his many nieces and nephews, rather than ridicule and derision upon himself for not thinking of it.
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A long time ago, I studied the monetary and cultural cost of certain aspects of the Imperial-era British penal system. I learned alot about how graft, social forces, governmental pressure, and random circumstance can shape not only the process of the justice system, but its punishment as well. And it didn't stop there. Oh, no. European legal thought and tradition are fundamental in many ways to our own, even as late as the development of our penitentiary system. And while I answered the questions I set out to adequately, I would have liked to take the work deeper. Perhaps, in the best tradition of scholars past, I ended my work feeling like I had posed still more questions, and opened doors on lines of inquiry I could pursue to make a lasting contribution to my wallet. Daah, my field. Lasting contribution to my field.
One topic that I wish I had thought of then but is on my mind lately is: what did cops do before there were drivers to ticket?
Seriously.
Because, over time, the police have become a guaranteed revenue stream into their city and state. An awful lot of them appear to be running radar; in certain regions of my domain, ensuring the safety of the larger commonweal one ticket at a time is the apparent raison detre of the State Police. Yes, they have other missions- they are the 911 for remote areas of the state; they have a kick-ass crime lab; they have really cool dogs- but really, they're primary mission seems to be to write tickets. I don't know the percentages of how many officers are out pulling people over, as opposed to the total number of officers on duty, but by casual observation it seems somewhere in the neighborhood of all of them.
So as a historically-minded cat, I have to ask myself how long that's been going on. Does the growth of the police force mirror the growth of the population, or more closely the growth of car ownership (if indeed the two are even distinguishable)? What was the pre-automobile analogue of police-generated revenue? Was pre-industrial society safer, since more police ought to have been available to fight crime? When did we decide it was ok for agents of the state to generate income for the government?
And no, I didn't recently get a ticket- I actually drive like an old lady. Well, an old lady who knows where she's going and how to drive. But in my daily travels I see folks bagged by the state cops hand over fist, and just have to ask whether that's really the best use of their time for the mission of maintaining peace and order for the citizenry, or the best use of their time for a rapacious state government?
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Mapgirl is on a quest to become more frugal, save lots of money, learn about finance and take over the world. To help her (and any other frugal wannabes amongst our readership) become more frugal, I offer this tutorial on dumpster diving.
[wik] Added note for Mapgirl: knit sweaters are not appropriate for dumpster diving. Nor are open-toed sandals. Dive away!
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Meanwhile, other scientists fear the asteroids. NASA is attempting to come up with some sort of scheme to defend us against rogue asteroids with unstable, likely Islamic orbits. The French, in a preemptive move, have already surrendered to asteroid 2004 XP14, which will make a close approach to the earth next monday. NASA insists that it is a global problem, and that other nations should really get off their asses and help out.
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Seth Shostak, SETI researcher and man-about-town, has a nice bit explaining why a sphere is such a inadequate shape for a homeworld. It is not exactly a new idea that we really ought to move off the planet and into the great void, but recently Stephen Hawking's comments have made the news. Hawking recommends new space colonies on the basis of the eggs in a basket rationale - that with life sequestered on just one world, we are vulnerable to a single point of failure - one asteroid, comet, disaster or alien invasion would put paid to the entire species. Fair enough, but Shostak argues that if we look at the tonnage to terrans ratio, the numbers are rather startling. For each of us, there is a trillion tons of earth. That's a lot of mostly inaccessible mantle and red hot magma for each of us. Moving into a more frothy or fractal living space would bring the ration down significantly. The asteroids have about the mass of the earth, but nearly all of it is easily accessible mass (assuming, of course, you have the capability to get to the asteroid belt. That mass could be readily converted to a living space ten thousand times that of earth - just assuming that you built domes on the surface of the rocks. If you actually cut them all up and made habitats out of them, the habitable volume could be millions bigger. Getting the ttt ration down to the order of a thousand or a hundred tons per person would be vastly more efficient. And therefore, we'd be better prepared to fight the giant fighting robots when they inevitably make their bid for domination.
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This just in, copied verbatim, other than the cheesy background graphic:
我有新的電郵地址！你現可電郵給我：{encode="mosesrfracisssys@yahoo.com.hk" title="mosesrfracisssys@yahoo.com.hk"}
DEAR,
BUSINESS WORTH US$22M I NEEDED A PARTNER
MR MOSES FRANCIS
- Francis Moses
I'd be tempted to introduce him to one of the, I'm sure, millions of crapweasels who try to effect such scams on a daily basis, if I knew of any of them. His entreaty was so poorly done that (ahem) it made it through my trashfilter, where all the "good ones" are instantly rejected without my ever knowing of them.
I have a small personal interest in getting him more in line with the state of the art, the "best practices", if you will, in his "industry". (The SIC code for his "industry" is, coincidentally the same as the one for "Assknobs" - look it up if you don't believe me). Messages such as his have to be at least a little better done to even be recognizable as the crap they are. Hopefully, some trollbot will pick up his email address from this page (which I've helpfully enclosed in a "mailto:" tag for easy digestion by said scum-sucking bottom-dwellers) and nuke his tiny alleged Yahoo mailbox into oblivion.
[wik] I'm not saying that "419" scams are actually so-named because they all originated in Toledo, Lima, Findlay, Fostoria, or Mansfield. But I'm not saying that they're not, either.
[alsø wik] If that really were his email address, I'd be tempted to suggest he learn to spell his own last name. But since he's clearly a bastard, he has no last name, at least not in the "polite 1950s society" sense of the word.
[alsø alsø wik] What do I know of "polite 1950s society"? Not much, to be honest, but while reading up on my family's genealogy four or five years ago, I learned for the first time that my grandfather was married 5 times, the first, third, and fifth, to my grandmother, after very short intervals of being married to other women. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
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The Centennial State has been renowned for many things, most recently high school massacres. But there is much more to The Rocky Mountain State. Like John Denver.
- Now 100% John Denver free!
- Squarer Than Wyoming
- Too wimpy to cross the mountains so we stopped here
- The vertical state
- Official home of the winter ski bunny
- If you're looking to visit South Park, please leave
- We hate Texans too
- See what John Denver meant by Rocky Mountain "high"
- The higher you go the happier you get state
- If You Don't Ski, Don't Bother
And on a personal note, I would like to suggest the following two mottoes:
- The Broncos Suck
- Die Elway Die
[wik] Bonus slogans!
- Thank God We're Out of Oklahoma
- Colorado: A Million Illegal Mexicans Can't Be Wrong
- Home of the Pikes Peak Community Technical Vocational College's intramural ultimate frisbee team: the Fighting Lark Buntings
- We gave the world Tim Allen AND Zachery Ty Bryan. Suck on THAT, Utah!
- The Reference Ellipsoid State
- Perversely enjoying being upstream of California AND Texas.
- Clothing and turn signals optional.
- Ok, SOMEBODY had to have a Boulder.
- We're ALL members of the Mile High Club.
- Yeah, we know the airport looks weird.
- More wildfires mean prettier sunsets.
- Colorado: The Million Illegal Mexicans Who Couldn’t Find Houston
- Die Elway, Die Die Die! GRAAAAHHHGH!
- Crushing the hopes of generations of Ohioans
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