The sting of citric acid.

So, if you look below this post, you will find a link to a story that I found, well, inspirational. A true tale of simple human kindness prevailing in the face of fear, ignorance and violence. I don't believe in much, but because of this story, I believed, for a moment, in people.

So filled was I with warm fuzzies that I decided to relate this story to a coworker. I explained the specifics, and stressed the mindset I imagined young Mr. Askari must have had when he made a more noble decision than I think I would have under the circumstances. I didn't actually use the word "hero", but I don't think that misses the mark.

After I'd finished, she told me "That's why I say 'Happy Holidays'." I guess the Wonderful Time is over now.

Life gave those kids on the subway lemons. At least all I got was collateral squirting.

Whenever life gets your down, Mrs. Brown,

and things seem hard or tough,
and people seem stupid, obnoxious or daft,
and you feel that you've had quite enough...

things start looking up. Or Graham Chapman sings a song to put everything in perspective. I almost wish it were the Graham Chapman thing, but what can you do?

Seriously, read that last story. It will help rekindle your belief in humanity. Which, I know, is not something I normally try to do here, but hey; when life gives you lemons, you can't make bitter, bitter apple juice.

Rapid fire.

See below for a post just a few minutes older than this one. Oh, but what a few minutes they were! I checked out the news, and as it turns out, Congress is dumb. Also, according to the news, Congress is dumb. But in other news, scientists are smart. But to switch subjects, people are dumb, dumb, dumb monkeys.That is all.

A meme!

So, for those of you who do not know, generally, a meme is the thought-equivalent of a gene; it gets passed on from one person to another, sometimes mutating in the process. In blogging, a meme is typically a set of questions that you answer and pass on to others, with the expectation that they, too will answer.

In one of my favorite blogs, I read a meme that encourages mutation, and had to pass it on. Here goes:

The rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question.

  For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
  

• You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is..."


• You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My ancestry:

My (great)^11-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My (great)^10-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My (great)^9-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My (great)^8-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My (great)^7-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My (great)^6-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
My (great)^5-grandparent is a k8, a cat, a mission.
My (great)^4-grandparent is Monkeygirl.
My (great)^3-grandparent is DancingFish.
My great-great-grandparent is "No One".
My great-grandparent is Field Notes.
My grandparent is The Clutter Museum.

My parent is Adventures in Ethics and Science.

The best children's novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Dragons of North Chittendon.
The best recent movie in comedy is: The Davinci Code.
The best karaoke song in rock ballads is: "Don't Stop Believin'"
The best cult novel in classic fiction is: Flatland.
The best high-fat food in Mexican cooking is: Taco salad.
The best economics-related words I ever received from a scholar are: "Nobody ever said, 'I have enough money now. I think I'll stop.'"
The best syndicated column in free weekly newspapers is: Savage Love.

So enjoy, have fun, and mess with it as much as you like! (Incidentally, the rules are unclear; by inspecting a couple of previous generations, I learned that you are allowed two changes overall, not per question. Or at least, that is how people have been playing it.)

A couple of stories:

First, a play.

Next, a sci-fi thriller bound to kill a few minutes.

Lastly, a news article.

In other news, this is my big post! Yay #256! (That's 2^2^3, for those of you in binary land.) Today's hidden message is: availability of communication.

Politics! The Blogpost!

I've been thinking about our political system ever since I heard one of the songs in the new musical, Caucus.

You really just can't make this shit up.

Anyway, I was thinking about the problem that most people have with our political system, which is, of course, everything. So let's narrow it down a little to the electoral process.

Most people seem to fall into one of two camps: Either they feel that it is every citizen's patriotic duty to vote in an informed, reasonable matter, or they feel that their own vote is just one drop in an ocean, except it doesn't matter quite as much.

So should you vote in an informed manner, or should you just stay home? Me, I say, vote according to your party lines without thinking about it.

Here's my thinking: You don't want a small group of informed people voting for everyone else; that's an oligarchy. (Yes, I know; that's also Congress, but read on and then let me know if you have any better ideas.) So you want the vote open to a lot of people.

But you also don't want all those people to vote so many different ways that, statistically, the last place candidate did about as well as the winner. That's a pretty random distribution, and that doesn't reflect the will of the people. So you want to polarize votes into a small number of groups: political parties.

Then, you invent a bunch of "controversies" and pretend that they actually affect the lives of the voters, so that they will care deeply about their parties and supply votes without thinking too much about it. That way, the votes by one large, unthinking mass are balanced out pretty well by the votes from the other large, unthinking mass(es). This means that, for the most part, peoples' votes don't matter, but those people don't think about politics, so they don't care. The very few people who DO care will then have a disproportionately large amount of power to sway elections one way or another, but those people (by definition) care about the issues that actually affect them, and so they will vote intelligently. That, my friend, is democracy.

At least, if I wanted to subjugate a large populace without having to worry too much about uprisings, rebellions and coups, that's how I'd go about it.

Topsy goddam turvy.

I saw this report from Reuters a few days back. It concerns a study from U of M (that's the actual University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, not that Urethra of Mine). I take care to cite sources here because these are not institutions well-known for fucking things up, or promoting muzzles for the media. So what the hell? How do they even find this out? Are there really that many adults running around who, as children, played hours and hours of Halo 3? Oh, wait; that would be impossible. So I have to wonder about their methodology here. I imagine some sort of crystalline sphere plays a central role in their research; or perhaps they have a more scientific method.

Then, in honor of World AIDS Day, I find out that (after a mere two and a half decades) some church somewhere is being instructed to actually go out and help people with AIDS. It seems like the guy doing the instructing here would have been less enlightened on the subject. Who'd have thought that faith could be used for something other than evil? It almost gives me hope to see a church doing something moral.

But I guess getting my hopes up would be too much to ask. Oh well. If we're all going to hell, at least, to quote Tom Lehrer, we will all fry together when we fry.