Academic “freedom” bill is closer to law

April 29th, 2008 • 2 comments education, idiocy

Seems Rep. Stroms and her cronies don’t want to stop with their nonsense. Their bill, incorrectly dubbed an “Academic Freedom” bill, is steps from being signed into law according to the Orlando Sentinel. Great! Scopes and Dover don’t mean anything to these people because they’re morons, up and down. I’m glad the proud citizens of Florida voted these idiots into office and keep them there (I didn’t vote them in, I can’t vote in this state…YET). Governor Crist will happily sign this bill into law, I’m sure. Not because he understands what it’s about or why it’s a bad idea but because he’s an idiot too.

One of the supporters of this bill said the House should welcome signing it into law because it’ll bring lawsuits and they — the representatives in the House, many lawyers — will enjoy having lawsuits to fight over. That means they’re aware they’re signing into law a very unstable bill that will end up getting a number of schools sued and they’re OK with that. No, scratch that. They want that to happen.

I’m glad I don’t have children in this state’s school system but at the same time, sad at the same fact. I can’t send my kid to class with a tape recorder to tape all the stupidity that’s sure to come once August gets here and school’s back in full swing. I can just hear all the litigation now and how this bill will probably get repealed in less than two years for causing such a financial strain on both the school systems and the state.

Sick…again pt. 2

April 29th, 2008 • chatter

Apparently some strain of influenza has been going around this is what I’ve got. I feel a lot better today than I did all weekend combined but still, I feel like crushed crap. Got the paper finished and turned in last night and I booked it out of class, touching as little as possible. We’re supposed to go see Epica tonight at the Culture Room but probably won’t be able to which really sucks seeing as we’ve waited about 7 months for this show and here I am, sick. Bleh.

I’m back at work today and it’s not great but at least I’m not eating up any vacation time. I think I need to get back to work although, do I really want to?

Sick…again

April 25th, 2008 • chatter

In addition to getting some good news at work yesterday, I also spent most of the day cold and feeling like I had been pelted in the stomach with a sledgehammer, along with nails driven into my head. Today, I felt pretty much the same minus the stomach pains. I’ve been sick twice this year already, I can’t believe this. This is twice as many times as I got sick last year, I believe. This is not going to help me in my research tonight, ugh!

Busy weekend coming up

April 24th, 2008 • chatter

I’ve got Friday-Sunday to write a paper. Sunday is a photo shoot on campus. I need to get our bike rims trued and tires reseated properly and the bikes adjusted to fit our body types. It’s been about a decade since I’ve had to do that and I realized tonight how rusty I am at it. Of course, my last bike was adjusted perfectly over about 4 years of tuning so I hope this doesn’t take 4 as well. I’d love to start taking this thing around but that’s not very effective to do on a 7 speed beach cruiser. If I wanted a decent car replacement, I’d just shell out a ton of money for a nice Trek or Voodoo (do they still make bikes?) or Kona (do they?). Oh well, those are some fond past memories.

Felt under the weather all day today, part cold/sick, part stressed. Took over 2 months to get my latest evaluation at work but it was worth it, got a $3000/year raise! And some extra vacation. That was the highlight of the day and luckily, it was at the end of the day too. Pretty depressing that I had to bring this thing up once a week for 9 weeks to get it done but at least it’s over until August. At which point it’ll be delayed again, I’m sure.

Cooked up some artichokes for dinner tonight, they were awesome. A great hand-off from our anchovy-gherkin-infused turkey breast dinner last night (also awesome). I’m kind of hungry now but they were great. Now I just wish I had a snack to go along with my honey tea.

It’s crunch time

April 24th, 2008 • chatter

Finals are next week and I have no idea what’s on my Human Evolution final. Andrew just kind of scooted us out of class last week without discussing it but discussing our option to go to the Elgin Center fund raiser after the final. I’ve also got a paper to write for Monday but I haven’t started it and I’m not too keen on cramming it in this weekend. After this semester is over, I get to apply to FAU for residence reclassification so I can actually take more classes for less money; otherwise I’m there for another 8 years for this degree. That’s manageable I suppose but I’m not going for a doctorate or anything here.

I started reading Josh Bernstein’s book about Digging For The Truth earlier this week and it’s definitely a light read. Glossy pages with nice pictures and easy writing. Good for those nights when I don’t want to really concentrate on what I’m reading. I miss the show but I hear his new show in Discovery is going to be pretty good as well but we’ll see when it airs in a few months. The Year of Living Biblically was finally finished and turned out somewhat expectedly. AJ came out of it still agnostic but respecting of Judeo-Christian faiths. I say good for him, at least he spent an entire year learning some off the wall things.

It’s research time, I suppose.

Classmates careening onto my site

April 18th, 2008 • chatter, idiocy

I just checked my Performancing incoming links from yesterday and noticed a search from West Palm and one from Boca. One was related to “what is the human concestor” (concestor to…what? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?) and the other “cladogram of horse to human evolution”. Clearly, two people who haven’t paid an iota of attention in class. One wanted to know the human concestor…of something — it’s Jesus and/or God and/or Magma as confirmed by both Sam and Rob, discussed while talking about the merits of ID junk science — and the other thinks we evolved from horses. That’s why Equus Unicorn went extinct, it turned into Homo sapiens retardensis! While I can’t pick out who these people are in class, I can take my guess on the second one.

On another note, Firefox’s built-in spell check doesn’t recognize the word “sapiens”. How long has this word been a normative descriptor in the English language, since Linneaus?

Here comes the weekend

April 17th, 2008 • chatter

I’m ready for the weekend, this week is the Binrev 561 meeting at Holloway’s and I’m ready to unwind. My friend is bringing his Sony Reader PRS-505 so I can see if the PDF processing is as bad as people make it out to be. Why can’t e-readers process PDFs very easily these days? I understand PDFs are formatted for 8.5″x11″ but it’s such an old format, you’d figure people would work around this stuff by now and make it very usable especially since so many published e-books are PDFs (and almost never in the formats the e-readers process well, what the hell?). Hopefully tomorrow’s bar time will be a welcome reprieve from this crappy week. I haven’t slept well all week but I know I will tomorrow night.

This weekend, I should be cooking as well but what, I’m not sure yet. I plan on making something out of Nigella Express, just not sure what. It’s got a lot of easy recipes that sound so tasty. There’s some ideas kicking around but I really need to get to the farmer’s market and to Whole Foods for supplies, I’m out of almost everything!

In class tonight, I found out I bombed the last test but then “it wouldn’t affect me that much”. Not too happy about the grade but happy that my cladogram is an “easy A”. A bunch of us were wondering if Halloran is even going to pay close attention to them, especially since so many people did a horse or horse cousin like a zebra. Oh well, I’ll find out soon enough. I got more books in the mail today and am pretty eager to read them. But I’m also stacking my summer to be as busy as it can be since I’m trying to get my music review site back off the ground along with photo shoots and such. It’ll be a busy summer, leading into a hopefully busy fall.

As for now, I’m going to go read.

I hate cladograms

April 17th, 2008 • chatter

Especially when we were assigned this at the beginning of the semester and the teacher has barely touched on this project at all. Now, not having discussed this in class wouldn’t be such a big deal if everyone had done a phylogenic tree or cladogram before but a lot of people have not done them before and had never seen them before being in this evolution class. I originally thought about doing something fancy like a tree-human concestor but the closer time came to do this project, I simply settled on a human-horse concestor. Only to find out that there is still no currently verifiable species that would be considered the concestor, only that scientists know — based on DNA — that Boreotheria was our last common ancestor.

I know a lot of my classmates are struggling with this as many, many of them are either not anthropology majors or this is one of their first classes to take as an anthro major. I have a feeling a lot of people will be turned off to taking more classes like this in the future because of any lack of real direction on behalf of our professor, a smart man in his own right. I’ve just finished my cladogram, it’s really pathetic looking but it’s also the third one I’ve drawn tonight, by hand. I don’t have time to try and draw a fancy one in Photoshop or something. Now I just need to get my girlfriend to draw some pretty arrows and it’s done.

Ugh! I’m so tired

April 14th, 2008 • 1 comment chatter

Today was supposed to be a nice day, a leisurely day spent at the Palm Beach International Film Festival like the last two days have been. Unfortunately things didn’t go that way. Woke up later than I anticipated but today was the day to fix my Saturn’s broken power window motor. Word to the wise: never replace the motor, just replace the regulator itself.

That thing was just a bitch to replace. Neither my Chilton nor Haynes manual stated the motor was riveted — with solid core rivets — to the regulator arm. Nor did any of the other sites detailing how to do it. Sure, they’d mention they replaced the motor but they didn’t, they just replaced the whole regulator part and parcel. Luckily the only real problem I ran into were these rivets. Getting the rivets out that held the regulator in the door wasn’t tough, just a pain to rip apart. I had to send my poor girlfriend to the store for some 1/4″x1 1/2″ bolts because I thought the motor was bolted on and I wouldn’t need extra parts. After bolting the stupid motor back on, getting the regulator back on just right took longer than expected but wasn’t difficult. Everything else after that was cake. I hate working on my car but I know more than enough not to pay some schlub $300 to replace my regulator when all it’s going to cost me is 2 hours and $70 for parts.

I’ve been Internet absent for a few days but I managed to get some stuff done like the repairs today. I finally finished up Kitchen Confidential on Thursday night. Great, brisk read. Bourdain reminds me why I hated line cooking and why I liked cooking in a restaurant. I haven’t cooked in days though, been busy! We’ve been gong to the Palm Beach International Film Festival (except for today) and it’s been good. We saw Oud L’ward (I don’t remember the English translation) on Friday night, it’s a story about a Moroccan girl traded into slavery and exalted because of her lute-playing abilities. It was a good story, continuity issues aside. Last night we saw two documentaries. The first was Rock and A Hard Place: Another Night at the Agora about South Florida’s rock scene of the late 70s to mid 80s. Really, it was about Miami’s rock scene and how it produced some fine bands but little recognition. Except for Johnny Depp. Just about everyone in the documentary was at the showing since it was the Florida premiere, except Johnny of course. It was good, got great crowd reaction. Jess really enjoyed the soundtrack. Afterwards, we didn’t realize how many of these guys we’d actually talked to before!

The second one was Begging Naked. The sad story of a teen runaway who turned out to not only like stripping but was an accomplished artist. Unfortunately, now she’s just homeless in Central Park. It was a very sad story, my girlfriend spent much of the movie with tears in her eyes. The directory, Karen Gehres, was very nice and fielded many questions after it was over. We told her we were very thankful for presenting Elise’s wrenching story in an unabashed medium. I also met another filmmaker after this documentary who’s currently studying directing while writing his autobiography. He was a pretty nice guy as well, enjoys his Starbucks quite a bit.

Now, I need to go off and read another chapter in The Year of Living Biblically. Yes, I’m finally going to finish it, I’m about 130 pages from the end.