What The F*** Mr. President??

My wife pointed out an article in the New York Times yesterday. She knew it would make me crazy.

This is like coming home and finding your 80 year old mother in a frenzied sex orgy, with bongs, kegs, and 130 decibels of Crunk pumping through the speakers.

The NY Times article claimed that POTUS not only read, but enthusiastically recommends to friends I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe. I thought Charlotte was a very very good novel (which puts me in the critical minority). It's shocking, however, that The President would be such a fan.

Charlotte contains long passages about the contemporary usage of the word f**k, scenes where religion is mocked, dozens of passages of marijuana, cocaine, and ecstasy use, disquisitions on oral sex, casual sex, drinking, cheating in school, corruption in the university, long passages mocking morality, chastity, and sportsmanship, and many many gallons of beer, wine, and Vodka. The pivotal chapter of the book details the date rape of Charlotte Simmons by a fraternity rat.

I am utterly baffled as to what The President would find to love in the book, at least in light of his public persona. The article speculates it may be a hearkening back to his hard partying fraternity days at Yale.

The official list of books The President reads does not include Tom Wolfe. The White House press office will tell you his favorite books are currently His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis (a great book, by the way), Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, and, of course, The Bible.

I keep thinking someone buffaloed the New York Times and we'll read a retraction of the story tomorrow. I just can't wrap my head around this one, it's so weird.
---o0o---

List No. 12: The Speed Of Animals

Speeds are in mph [1]

Cheetah 70
Pronghorn antelope 61
Wildebeest 50
Lion 50
Thomson's gazelle 50
Quarterhorse 47.5
Elk 45
Cape hunting dog 45
Coyote 43
Gray fox 42
Hyena 40
Zebra 40
Mongolian wild ass 40
Greyhound 39.35
Whippet 35.50
Rabbit (domestic) 35
Mule deer 35
Jackal 35
Reindeer 32
Giraffe 32
White-tailed deer 30
Wart hog 30
Grizzly bear 30
Cat (domestic) 30
Human 27.89
Elephant 25
Black mamba snake 20
Six-lined race runner 18
Wild turkey 15
Squirrel 12
Pig (domestic) 11
Chicken 9
Spider (T. atrica) 1.17
Giant tortoise 0.17
Three-toed sloth 0.15
Garden snail 0.03

[1] Most of these measurements are for maximum speeds over approximate quarter-mile distances. Exceptions are the lion and elephant, whose speeds were clocked in the act of charging; the whippet, which was timed over a 200-yard course; the cheetah, timed over a 100-yard distance; the human, timed for a 15-yard segment of a 100-yard run (of 13.6 seconds); and the black mamba, six-lined race runner, spider, giant tortoise, three-toed sloth, and garden snail, which were measured over various small distances.
Source: Natural History magazine, March 1974. Copyright © The American Museum of Natural History, 1974.

Poem: Daybreak

Our spiring sun sheds tons a day
But each still dawn
Clears the rooftops again
To roost with the morning stars.

The hills tumble down
Rock by rock
And the rivers zig
Where they used to zag.

Trees
Run
Rings
Around
Themselves.

Why do we call it sunrise,
When it's just earth
Rolling over
Like a dog?
---o0o---

Message In A Bottle

click to enlarge

The picture on the left went into space with one of our early interstellar craft. It explains where earth is [1], what homo sapiens looked like naked (like Barbie and Ken), and other information, like a diagram indicating the location of our sun.

Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) has been working on this "Interstellar Outreach Program" for many years [2]. The gold-plated disk above, is a bronze record containing sounds and images of life on earth. Each of the two Voyagers is equipped with a record player of sorts--with a cartridge, even--to play the disk, and recover the images.

The two circles in the bottom right side of the record show the two lowest states of a hydrogen atom. The vertical lines on the circles show the spin moment of the electron and proton. And (is this cool, or what?) the transition time from one state to the next provides the fundamental clock reference used in ALL the cover diagrams and the images to be decoded from binaries.

Carl Sagan and a team of other folks designed and selected the Voyager's messages and data. The disk includes a greeting in 55 different languages, from Aramaic to Vietnamese. The record also includes a sampler of non-human Earth sounds such as wind, rain, surf, chimps, sheep, crickets, saws, and trains. It contains photos as well, and maps, diagrams of DNA, vertebrate anatomy charts, chemical and mathematical definitions, and other visual displays. The disk includes Beethoven, a Chuck Berry tune (Johnny B, Goode), Bach and Mozart, a Navajo chant, Indian Ragas, and a Louis Armstrong recording. There are 116 binary images on the record.

No one know if the aliens who find this will be able to use it, or decode the information. Will they even have hands? Opposable thumbs? Will they even think in any path parallel to ours? Will the disk just look like gibberish to them? Their scientists--if they have science (and we assume they must)--may need to study the disk for a couple of thousand years before they make a breakthrough.

A book titled Murmurs of the Earth, writtten by Sagan and colleagues, was reissued in 1992 with a CD-ROM compilation of the Golden Record, and a description of its creation. It's out of print, but you can pick up a copy fairly cheaply.

The movie Starman portrayed the Voyager Golden Record being located by an extra-terrestial intelligence who subsequently sent one of their own race to investigate intelligent life on Earth.

Don't hold your breath that any of our cousins in other galaxies will find this and come to visit. The Voyager will not come close to another star for something like 40,000 years. But then again, when you're dealing with our alien cousins Out There, 40,000 years may just be a sneeze in the winds of time.

[1] Or, maybe by the time it is found, where earth was.
[2] We also regularly beam messages out into the void, and hopefully, to our alien cousins, through our Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico.
---o0o---

A Flag For The New Democracy

Click image to enlarge
(C) 2005 Jack Brummet

Poem: The Book Of Revelations Is "Taps" For Turtle Island

Seven seals seven vials
seven lamps of fire
seven swift sickles
for seven angels

the last trumpet
blows reveille and taps
wake up wake up
it's time to go to sleep

over the hills
and far away
The Piper
is piping us home.
---000---

jack brummet

Favorite Websites No. 7

click to enlarge (if you can bear to)

Found photos is an interesting repository for found photographs. Many are hilarious, many are very strange, there are some interesting ones, and a few tasteless ones. Whatever the case, it's always amusing. Click on the title of this post for a link there. /jack
---o0o--

"American Idol" Trounces "The State Of The Union"

Click on the title to hook up to more info - Click image to enlarge

The U.S broadcast TV audience would rather watch contestants sing, mostly badly, than tune in to The President for an hour (followed by the Democrats annual whine fest). Idol, on one channel in one hour, whipped POTUS and The Dems despite POTUS's speech appearing on all three networks over two hours.
---o0o---

Turn A Mouse Into Soup In 30 Seconds!

Click image to enlarge

I was unable to determine how much these units cost. I don't think it would be cost-effective for whipping up your Hollandaise Sauce. /jack

Poem: Explosions

Every last cell
in the body

is replaced over
seven years time

I'm not the Jack
I was in 1998

poems and explosions
go off in my skull

as each cell fades
my brain rewires itself

and the new circuits
begin to sing

in a synapse chorus line
and I don't know

if I will wake up
in the morning

as Adolph Hitler
or Bishop Tutu

or something
in between.
---o0o---

Iraqi Terrorists Becoming Facile With Photoshop

John Adam -click photo to enlarge
click title for a link to the CNN story

The U.S. military said Tuesday that no American soldiers have been reported missing in Iraq following an internet statement that an American soldier had been taken hostage. In Baghdad, the U.S. military's press office in Baghdad said "no units have reported anyone missing."

The posting, on a militant-sympathetic Web site included a photo of what they said was an American soldier in desert fatigues sitting on the floor with his hands tied behind his back. The figure with the gun to his head was in fact a "G.I. Joe"-style doll, made by Dragon Models USA.

The militants claimed to be holding other American soldiers (or possibly, a case of G.I. Joes). "Our mujahedeen heroes of Iraq's Jihadi Battalion were able to capture American military man John Adam after killing a number of his comrades and capturing the rest," said the statement, signed by the "Mujahedeen Brigades."
---o0o---

Do Not Pull The Trigger. . .

click image to enlarge - from an air rifle instruction booklet printed in China