Month: November 2007

Avenge yourself against ghost dialers who start talking at you in a Spanish recorded message or who hang up after you pick up (registration required):

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/technology/personaltech/15ghost.html

The gist: http://www.whocalled.us/ keeps a registry of offenders. Get information on the callers and complain to their local Better Business Bureau.

I love the routine emails I receive from people as forwards of some little factoid about this or that. The latest ones are “DOOM!” posts about “In God We Trust” being taken off the US Dollar coins…

From: Some Chick Subject: Fwd: FW: New $ coin

This was sent to me today. Can you really believe they have gone this far. How sad for our great nation.

Please help do this refuse to accept these when they are handed to you. I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead. The lady just smiled and said “way to go”so she had read this e-mail. Please help out….our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!

U.S. Government to Release New Dollar Coins

You guessed it ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ IS GONE!!! If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!

DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE

Together we can force them out of circulation. Please send to all on you mail list !!!

My response to the email was short and to the point, but I have a bigger rant to follow…

On Wed, November 14, 2007 07:42, Some Chick wrote: > ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’ IS GONE!!!

It’s true that a few of the first run of these new dollar coins are defective. Around 50,000 coins are missing the edge inscriptions entirely, which include “E Pluribus Unum”, “In God We Trust”, the mint marks, and the year produced. Coins with this minting error are already a collector’s item among the 300-million run of dollars… the rest of which do not share this defect.

In my opinion, if you acquire one of these rare “godless dollars”, you should probably keep it in your coin collection rather than turn it down for ideological reasons. They are currently worth around $50 on eBay.

Regards, Matthew P. Barnson Urban Legend Aficionado

That said, I want to address the fear-mongering in the original email.

Can you really believe they have gone this far.

Who is this mythical “they” who have “gone this far”? What is “their” agenda? I believe that this ties in to the common American mythology of government: that those in government are atheist-loving, god-hating liberals who want nothing more than to deprive your children of their religious liberty by imposing state-sanctioned godlessness on their poor little hearts.

This is the type of bogeyman used to scare people into action. While I applaud activism and consider it a necessary and fruitful area of politics, I detest the farcical means used to drum up support.

I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead. The lady just smiled and said “way to go”so she had read this e-mail.

I believe you mis-heard. What she actually said is “What an idiot.”

Together we can force them out of circulation.

Umm, no, you can’t. Just like misogynists who hated the Susan B. Anthony dollar because it featured a women’s rights activist, you will labor in vain the rest of your days for an utterly useless cause. These things are slated to be produced for the next decade (one new president per quarter-year). There are no plans to take the dollar bill out of circulation yet… but all the right-wing-nutjob schemes in the world won’t make a dent when they are based on faulty information.

our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!

If by “in enough trouble” you mean “has the lowest rate of crime, war, and death along with the highest quality-of-life, wealth, and education per capita in human history”, then I agree. Otherwise, you’re off your flamin’ rocker.

That said, yes, the USA is in some trouble financially as a result of ill-considered Middle Eastern wars. This will correct in time.

Please send to all on you mail list

There are certain suggestions which should always be ignored. These include things like:

• “Shout ‘FIRE!’ in a crowded theater!”
• “Get involved in a land war in Asia!”
• “Hey, watch this!” <thud>
• “Please forward this email to everybody you know.”

Seems that Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and IM have won the internet communication war. Blogs and email are for old farts:

http://slate.com/id/2177969/

I like keeping a blog though. It’s therapeutic, and I enjoy writing. Perhaps I should open up a Facebook and Myspace account, then write a program to automatically post to those sites when I update my blog… worth a thought!

“My name’s Steve… and I’m a super-villain.” Line me up to load Linux on my Fembot.

Another myth… busted. This one comes from the Great White North.

Eskimos don’t have many times more “words” for “snow” than English does. Because several Eskimo languages are polysynthetic, like German, they allow words to be smashed together to form a new word, when in English such a word would be considered a phrase. Some of the languages have a few more words for snow than English, some a few less. Yupik, for instance, has around 24 words to describe frozen water… while English has around 40.

Now according to the discussion page, the debunking has been debunked… but the long and short of it is, some Eskimo languages have a few more words for snow, some a few less. So the next time someone tries to use this tired old canard, you can prepare a ready comeback to look the part of the pedantic curmudgeon you really are inside!

Marvel Comics has put an archive of back issues online. For those of us (like me!) interested in catching up on the stories but not willing to spend a fortune collecting back-issues, it’s a godsend. I hope they expand it to include special editions, short-run canceled comics, and the like.

For a limited time they have several hundred issues available for free. They’ll be publishing a library of thousands of comics initially, with 20 more being added every week. The price is $60 a year to subscribe, and there will be a 6-month delay from press to online versions… but for the comic aficionado, it’s totally worth it.

I’m catching up on Astonishing X-Men (Joss Whedon’s take on X-Men) right now. Cool stuff.

September: Gramma Cantley died. October: Dennis Ker, my stepfather of 18 years, died. November: Grandmother Masil Murphy died.

Who’s next? December and January are free.

This is the worst Autumn EVER.

Several years ago, my wife was watching over my shoulder as I played Everquest. She remarked that I did an awful lot of running in that game.

“Imagine if you had to run in real life like you run in the game?”

We bandied back and forth, and decided that if there was a way to force a gamer to exercise in order to get higher performance from their in-game avatars, we’d have a much healthier computer-gaming set. The future we talked about seven years ago is finally here:

http://www.gamercize.net/pcsport.htm

Yes, I want one. I don’t know if I want it for this Christmas, but I’d love one under my desk. I just had my blood pressure taken yesterday, and it’s 120/90… which means the diastolic is about 10 points higher than it should be. Exercise and losing weight are two of the proven methods, outside of drugs, which can drop your diastolic reading several points. Sign me up!

Warning: Rant follows.

The little scrub brush is provided next to the toilet for a reason. If you take a splatter-filled power-dump in my toilet, for the love of all that’s holy, please take a moment to scrape your leftover high-velocity corn scraps into the water.

You see, corn makes a natural sort of glue, and if your partially-digested diarrheal remains stay on the porcelain for more than a few minutes, I must scrub vigorously to remove them. I have better things to do than energetically scratch the overindulgent streaks from your gas-assisted rectal explosives from my bathroom.

Perhaps a small sign like “Please use the scrub brush before you leave” might do the trick. What I really want to say is “Nobody wants to see what’s left of your butt-warhead, Nimrod, so please clean up your skid marks.”

But that wouldn’t be a polite reminder, would it?

For you married couples out there, I ran across a great blog entry that talks about being willing.

Warning: This is a post about sex. So if you’re at work or something, maybe you want to wait until you’re home. And if you’re a teenager, maybe you file this info away in your brain as something to work on when you’re older…

But it’s an idea that I’ve personally held for a long time that I’m glad to see expressed so clearly…

You don’t need to be frenetic or necessarily spontaneously aroused to want to be with your partner. You just need to be willing to get into the mood. Even if you’re not there now, if you’re willing to get started, you can create a nice experience that both of you enjoy.

I’m beginning to experience that now in my mid-thirties. I don’t have the instant readiness I had at eighteen. It takes a bit more work. But there’s no reason for me to reject the advances of my partner, even if I’m “not in the mood”… because with just a few minutes and a willingness, I could be.