Goose the Blog 2.0

"Oh, ha! Sarcasm: The last refuge of sons of bitches!"

5/28/2004

out of context

by John at 5/28/2004 04:34:00 PM

I need a little help. I ran across this quote from conservative intellectual Thomas Sowell, but it had no context: "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." Who is he talking about? Because I can think of a few names...

And while I'm at it, here's another good one from Sowell: "One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances."

Heh.

you know he's right

by John at 5/28/2004 04:25:00 PM

Billmon tells the unpleasant truth.

are you a world traveler? are you hungry?

by John at 5/28/2004 08:58:00 AM

If your answers to these questions are "yes" and "yes", and if you are still eating at McDonald's after reading Fast Food Nation, then this handy chart (scroll down) will tell you the price of a Big Mac in many nations and regions around the globe. Notice that in Iceland, a Big Mac costs $6.01. This is the second most expensive burger on the planet (Kuwait's is an astonishing $7.33). Don't even get me started on Icelandic salads...

Oh yeah, for you Big Picture types, it also represents a measure of how over- or under-valued the given currency is against the US dollar, and gives an estimate of "purchasing power parity."

5/27/2004

miscellaneous

by John at 5/27/2004 01:31:00 PM

  1. If you're here, you can see that I'm trying out a new template. I kept the same color scheme. Like it or not? I can always go back to the old one. For the pleasure of Goose fans everywhere, I plan to incorporate his smiling face somewhere on the page once I sit down with an image editor. I have incorporated his smiling face on the page.

  2. Some of our Hawai'i vacation photos are posted here. Warning: they are unusually boring, unless you enjoy looking at the extended Dong family. Then again, you don't have to look at them, do you? The lava ones are kind of cool - just click through to the last thumbnail page. Also, don't miss the southernmost point in the USA on page four!

  3. I'm thinking about leaving Haloscan (oh, the memories...) and using Blogger powered comments instead. This would allow anyone with a Blogger account to comment and edit or delete their own comments! Anonymous comments are allowed, too, but can't be editted. The problem is, old posts won't get comment fields, and I'd remove the Haloscan comment link, so the old discussions will seem to disappear. (They will actually be stored on Haloscan's servers, so I can see them with a little work, but the average user will not be able to get to them). Any thoughts on this?


5/26/2004

an open letter to George W. Bush

by John at 5/26/2004 05:16:00 PM

Dear Mr. President,

After reading the news over the last few days, I have arrived at the studied conclusion that your foreign policy sucks. I mean, seriously, what the Hell were you guys thinking? I'll tell you what you were thinking - you weren't thinking.

Yours sincerely,

John B.

P.S. Your domestic policy sucks, too.

5/25/2004

summer work

by Bill at 5/25/2004 06:36:00 PM

It looks like a go...this summer I will be leaving my new job for a few weeks (at a family practice clinic in Woodinville, a suburb of Seattle) to go on a research vessel to the gulf of Alaska. No I won't be doing any research, I will the medical officer for the vessel. Five weeks in the open ocean, they told me we will be too far away from land to see anything, but occassionally gray whales can be seen riding the bow like dolphins. We will also be too far way for helicopter service, so hopefully there won't be any major medical emergencies! I'll let you know how things go, I should have intermittent internet access while onboard. The research vessel is a joint operation from John Hopkins and the University of Washington, keep and eye open for me on the discovery channel, I'll be the guy in the background looking confused.

M/V Independence.

a sad attempt

by Bill at 5/25/2004 06:03:00 PM

okay, I'll try and post something using HTML, for John's sake. He's put a lot of effort into this and I feel like I have let him down. Any way, I was looking for a new car to purchase, my '89 accord is nearing the end. (I'm thinking about getting one of those new scions, but that's another story). So I was browsing the BBC website, and happened upon a slide show form the Birmingham auto show. That's when I saw it, amazing, beautiful, huge, and it probably came when assembly instructions the size of an unabridged dictionary.



Birmingham Motor Show

apophenia

by John at 5/25/2004 08:49:00 AM

apophenia: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things; seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist

If you are like me, you love "Futurama". This morning I was checking out several excellent panoramas compiled from multiple screen grabs from "Futurama" episodes at punkasspunk.com.

"Cool. What else has this guy got?" I wondered.

Browsing around, I find "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. I'm not a poetry guy, really, but this poem has always resonated for me. It reminded me that my favorite Eliot poem, however, is "The Hollow Men."

When I get to the fifth part
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I get goosebumps all over.

5/24/2004

new blogger interface

by John at 5/24/2004 09:57:00 AM

For those of you who haven't posted in a while (all of us!) Blogger has a new interface. It's pretty good. Check it out - and since you are there anyway, you might even want to post something.

restart the world

by John at 5/24/2004 09:43:00 AM

Hi folks!

We are back from Hawaii. We saw actual redhot lava actually flowing downhill on its way to the ocean. We saw a humpback whale momma breach out of the water in the company of her baby and a couple of porpoises. We saw a yellow moray eel and I saw an octopus (Wendy did not). Cool stuff. I may put some photos up.

It looks like the world pretty much stopped while we were gone. Aside from the Phillies grabbing the NL East lead nothing much happened, right? Even the cicadas in our area held off - or maybe they are just waiting for 2006 and a Democratic president, trying to shake things up by going to a 19 year cycle. So listen, world, we are back and you can start up again. I'm expecting something good this time around.