Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Windpipes? Really?


"Anatomy of a hot dog."


"Hot dogs typically contain muscle meat trimmings from pork or beef. Contrary to legend, they do not contain animal eyeballs, hooves or genitals, according to the Hot Dog Council’s Janet Riley.
But the government does allow them to contain pig snouts and stomachs, cow lips and livers, goat gullets and lamb spleens. If they have these byproducts, the label should spell out which ones, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman said.

Check the label of a name-brand hot dog, and chances are fat provides around 80 percent of total calories, more than double what’s often advised. What’s more, saturated fat and trans fat — the fats most strongly linked with artery-clogging — are common ingredients, in some cases providing at least half the fat content."


So why did god have to make them taste so damn good?

And what the hell is a 'goat gullet'? That doesn't sound any kinda right....



Saturday, August 23, 2008

Check your "Fowler's"....

I have a confession to make: I love our language. Our bastard, spoiled, rule-breaking son-of-a-bitch of a language. Our barroom, locker-room, newsroom language. Our 'lite' language, our media language, our ad-copy language. The language sung in our favorite songs, misused in our beer ads, overused in our sophomoric poetry. I love language, and I delight in our trainwreck of a melting-pot of a mixed-metaphor of a language!

And when you enjoy something (music, movies, food) you look to the process (the guitar, the camera, the spoon). I've therefore spent most of my life reading grammar guides, style books, thesauri. I have a small library of books about writing, books of forgotten words, books about, er, books.

My bible, turned to daily for spiritual guidance, is my 20-plus year old, well loved, well stained American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition. (Years ago I got in the habit of making a small tick next to any word I looked up, now roughly 9 out of 10 pages (in a random sampling I just did) have at least one check).

I cherish my old friends Bill Strunk and E. B. White, and turn to them often for corrections on those little rules I never remember.

From Chicago I get the journalist's bible (and the coolest title) the Manual of Style.
Seriously, how cool is that? It should be the name of a Miles Davis album. "Miles Davis, the Manual of Style".

But the one guide I truly cherish, the one that always leaves a smile in the back of my mind, the one I don't turn to often enough is H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage. Most often simply referred to as Fowler's, it lives by itself with a nice pension in a little cottage just off the Oxford grounds.

It is fastidiously accurate. It is a model of efficiency. It is even, in it's own way, playful (if occasionally cantankerous).

I decided to write this little blog after coming across the following entry while I was thumbing through my copy this morning. It stood out from the other entries concerning correct use of onomatopoeia, the differences between Jacobean, Jacobin, and Jacobite, what etc. really means and when/how it should be used. It is a wonderful example of everything about Fowler's that I love (and by a beautifully circular 'meta-' process, everything I love about our language). It is simple, it is direct, it is even a bit (playfully?) dismissive:

superstitions. Among the most enduring of the superstitions or myths about our language are these: sentences should not begin with and or but; sentences should not end with a preposition; and infinitives should not be 'split'. For further examples of such beliefs, see FETISHES.

Sublime!
(A word I use a little too often; I've yet to find a suitable synonym).



Tuesday, August 12, 2008

As an occasional law-breaker & firm believer in personal liberties...

...I have a huge problem with this story. I do believe these actions violate your Fourth Amendment rights.

But as a guy who wants every rapist and murder caught, stopped & destructively removed from society (and the gene-pool) I think this is a great development for law enforcement:


Police turn to secret weapon: GPS device
Privacy advocates say electronic tracking violates Fourth Amendment rights

Someone was attacking women in Fairfax County and Alexandria, grabbing them from behind and sometimes punching and molesting them before running away. After logging 11 cases in six months, police finally identified a suspect.


David Lee Foltz Jr., who had served 17 years in prison for rape, lived near the crime scenes. To figure out if Foltz was the assailant, police pulled out their secret weapon: They put a Global Positioning System device on Foltz's van, which allowed them to track his movements.

Police said they soon caught Foltz dragging a woman into a wooded area in Falls Church. After his arrest on Feb. 6, the string of assaults suddenly stopped. The break in the case relied largely on a crime-fighting tool they would rather not discuss.

Across the country, police are using GPS devices to snare thieves, drug dealers, sexual predators and killers, often without a warrant or court order. Privacy advocates said tracking suspects electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, violating Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step toward George Orwell's Big Brother society. Law enforcement officials, when they discuss the issue at all, said GPS is essentially the same as having an officer trail someone, just cheaper and more accurate. Most of the time, as was done in the Foltz case, judges have sided with police.




Read the whole story here, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26167805
and decide for yourself if this is good news or bad. I still don't know how I feel....



Monday, August 11, 2008

The future will bring some disturbing shit....


"The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth!"

"BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight."


Check the video they provide for the creapiest robot-walk I've ever seen. I want a large version of this, with a big cab (like a SnoCat) that I can ride around the back-country in, scaring the natives:

http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

Be sure to watch for the point a little over half-way through when they show their beast slipping & sliding & recovering on some ice. You'll swear it's a living creature reacting to its environment.


PS: I ADORE their copy: "BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots." That line has 'Omni Consumer Products' written all over it!


Friday, August 8, 2008

THIS I don't need....




Driving home at 2:30am (a little drunk, a little stoned) on a warm summer morning with the windows down and the college radio station pumping out French hiphop it's easy to feel all is right with the world.

I am not allowed to feel all is right with the world.

Suddenly I'm blinded from behind by those horrible bluedeath headlights. (You know the kind; when they're heading toward you they make the back of your eyes cramp up. When they come up behind you it feels like you're in that pickup that gets stuck on the tracks in 'Close Encounters').

And then I'm being tailgated by the asshole with the 'needles-of-death' headlights.

Now I need to let you know I hate tailgaters. There's very few people & very few actions I hate (truly hate) more than tailgaters.

Until recently in Washington the law was fairly straight forward; in a rear-end accident the car following is at fault. The idea being; if you were following at a safe distance you could have avoided hitting the car in front of you. I used this to my advantage on many occasions.

The most 'famous' being a certain Ms. Crager. She tried to cut me off, even though I had the right-of-way & was already in the intersection. Since she couldn't cut in front of me she decided to tailgate for the next couple of blocks. I slammed on my brakes hard enough she had no chance of avoiding the accident, slamming in to the back of my (piece of shit) car hard enough to push me forward a few feet. Pulling out, feigning an interest in pulling over & exchanging pertinent (though non-existent on my part (thank you Photoshop!)) car insurance information, I led her to the next gas station, then cut through the nearest light as it changed to red.

Went to the liquor store, drove home. When Julie & I got out and checked my rear bumper for damage we found somebody else's license plate stuck in it. Pealing it off it turned out to be a 'vanity plate', with the name MS CRAGR.

Ha! Princess not only fucked up the front of her car, she lost her vanity plate she had to pay extra for!

To this day it hangs on my wall as a 'trophy of war':



Where were we? Oh yeah: 2:30am — drunk & stoned — French hiphop — tailgater.

Before I have a chance to get worked up, the tailgater hits his highbeams, filling my little RX7 with whiteblue disorientation. It's so blinding I can't clearly see the road ahead of me and am forced to follow the white line in the lower right of frame. Very safe.

And then the whole world turns into Spencer's Gifts (and yes I had my camera ready, I do that sometimes when I don't have a weapon with me):



Turns out the rave going on behind me was in reality a Seattle cop, who suddenly decided tailgating me on a back-road at 2:30 in the morning wasn't enough sport, he needed to find a spot with a little more action. He fired up his lightbar & shot past me into the night.

Thanks Seattle police; nothing says 'Preventing crime, enforcing laws, supporting public safety' like tailgating with highbeams on at 2:30am.

Oh, and that last photo perfectly expresses the state of my mind at the instant that cop hit his party lights.

This I don't need....