They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

Bob Dylan is my favorite singer/songwriter.  Original, I know, and I’ll spare you the diatribe about his greatness as his standing among the 20^th century’s greatest performers and personas is well established.  He is immortal as far as the history of music is concerned and bears responsibility for some of the best musical and lyrical offerings ever produced.  That being said, Dylan’s undertakings became more mercurial as his career went on, and in addition to having written some of the most powerful and groundbreaking songs of his generation (or ever), he may also have lashed together some of the worst I’ve ever heard.  This ongoing series entitled Bob Dylan’s Bad Dreams seeks to bring those forgotten anti-classics into full view with naught but love and admiration.  The idea is to keep this list going on a semi-regular basis until I run out of things to say.

Album: Knocked Out … Read more

Bob Dylan is my favorite singer/songwriter.  Original, I know, and I’ll spare you the diatribe about his greatness as his standing among the 20^th century’s greatest performers and personas is well established.  He is immortal as far as the history of music is concerned and bears responsibility for some of the best musical and lyrical offerings ever produced.  That being said, Dylan’s undertakings became more mercurial as his career went on, and in addition to having written some of the most powerful and groundbreaking songs of his generation (or ever), he may also have lashed together some of the worst I’ve ever heard.  This ongoing series entitled Bob Dylan’s Bad Dreams seeks to bring those forgotten anti-classics into full view with naught but love and admiration.  The idea is to keep this list going on a semi-regular basis until I run out of things to say.

Album: Slow Train … Read more

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Forgive the bad pun in the headline.  I couldn’t resist.

I don’t know if anyone out there still actually believes in the notorious “Face on Mars” located in the Red Planet’s Cydonia region, but just in case, those of you with any lingering trepidation may put your fears to rest.  PhysOrg.com has just published an article outlining a new photograph of the area at a much higher resolution that confirms (again) the face is nothing more than your common, garden variety Martian mesa and reaffirms those who’ve been shouting the Face was simply a byproduct of optical illusion and pareidolia.  (Go figure that the originating citation from the PhysOrg.com article emanates from FOXNews.com, which has surprised me for the second time in a week with a well-reasoned article.  Murdoch must be losing his sensationalist touch, but take a quick skim through the comment boards, … Read more

Courtesy of goodrob13's photostream. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/goodrob13/3928208574/)

So the Obama administration is presently hemorrhaging classified information courtesy of WikiLeaks, the Bush administration is doing so posthumously, the earth’s crust is hemorrhaging oil, and Tom Vilsack is simply battling an embarrassing case of hemorrhoids after/during the stress of the Shirley Sherrod debacle.  Those are the big stories at the moment, but in true form for a real live Twenty-First Century Narcissist, I’m not really thinking about all that right now.

Something terrible happened on Sunday at Dave & Buster’s… I lost.

In and of itself, losing is not a rarity in my life though I am, in general, more accustomed to winning.  But on Sunday evening, I lost in a big way.  I lost at everything.  Even now, my ego hasn’t restored itself, nor will the chasm be sated or filled by gobbling up Scrabble wins and cheap, trivial victories. … Read more

http://www.flickr.com/photos/migrainechick/ / CC BY 2.0

So this article on the NewScientist website really chapped my ass.

It cites the publication of a new study that outlines successful use of acupuncture to treat spinal injuries induced in rats.  Now, I’m not a doctor, and I’m unable to access the full-text of the study in question.  My suspicions are that some qualified party will cite methodological issues, or more likely, the study will remain a footnote  in light of the overwhelming weight of evidence in favor of the interpretation that acupuncture possesses no therapeutic benefit beyond that of placebo. (Maybe not.  We’ll see, but I doubt it.)

From the article:

Acupuncture’s scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries.

Well, not really.  For a great review of the current literature regarding acupuncture and an even greater deal of irate bitching … Read more

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy when I was a kid, and his show stands as probably the earliest discernible science-related influence I can remember.

Imagine my disappointment when I happened across Brian Dunning’s post over at Skepticblog that discusses Nye’s recent promotion of a cleaning product called Ionator from the company Activeion.  Essentially, the company has recruited Nye to endorse a line of water ionizers the cheapest of which is priced at $169 and the science behind which is unproven and dubious.

I’m not going to get into the debate over the science of their claims.  You can scroll through the comments on Skepticblog, which do a decent enough job of hashing out the quandaries, and you can read an article by Dr. Stephen Lower, a retired chemist from the Department of Chemistry at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, … Read more

Image Courtesy of DevilCrayon (http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035676122@N01) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

(That title sounds like something I never hoped I’d write. The first part is admittedly stolen from the Round Table via this Monty Python sketch.)

If you’re an office worker like me, you probably spend quite a bit of time clicking a mouse and pounding on a keyboard.  The time you spend doing this also might lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury.  In my case, my right index finger is nearly perpetually swollen, stiff, and in pain because I learn my lessons slowly and rail in the face of common sense when it comes to my own well-being.

There are a number of ways to combat your office-wrought deterioration.  You could drop money on ergonomic products like gel pads to support your wrist or braces designed to prevent the common motions that bring on … Read more

Image Courtesy of Ian Britton and FreeFoto.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.

As best I can remember, I originally posted this blog post some time during 2005 or 2006 on the now-defunct WritingUp.com, and because I’ve been too busy (or something) to maintain a semblance of a working blog these past few months, I hereby provide this tasty archival morsel.  It is my sincerest hope that posting these foul words precludes some increased production on my part in the near future.

In case my words are misunderstood in these strange and uncertain times, let it be known in no uncertain terms that I do not promote or condone violence against anyone for their race, religion, creed, or sexual orientation.

Indeed. Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy. This is perhaps the most important Commandment ever carved into a stone tablet, and it is one you … Read more

Simon Read. War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder. Union Square Press, 2009. 320 pages. ISBN-10: 1402756127

“Journalism [is]… a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Simon Read begins War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder with two quotations, the first an excerpt from the Daily Dramatic Chronicle (later the San Francisco Chronicle) comparing the marksmanship of American journalists to that of their French counterparts and the second a fitting quote from Thompson’s indelible The Great Shark Hunt, a landmark collection of essays and articles that chronicle Thompson’s slog through the mid- to late-1960s and 1970s.

It is hard to imagine anything (journalistically, at least) that rivals the depravity Thompson encountered and, in some cases, perpetuated during the Hippie movement, the 1972 presidential campaign, and Richard Nixon with … Read more

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paladin27/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I am forced to sit here and suffer through another long afternoon of pretending to work largely because I have become more efficient as a worker.  I wouldn’t even go as far as to say that I’ve automated everything because, in truth, I haven’t automated anything.  I’ve simply succeeded in cutting down the number of steps it takes to complete certain tasks, eliminated needless components of the job, and don’t have to amass a library of printed pages to do one simple thing on the computer.  Combined with a relatively high level of aptitude for quickly executing brain-wasting computer work, my total output exceeds that of a normal worker  by High Noon.

Mind you, I’m running my own internal statistics, and it is a rare occasion indeed that such numbers should be trusted or taken at face value, but I assure you, any … Read more

Image from Wikimedia Commons

It happened very suddenly. A large pair of artificial breasts shrouded in a loose-fitting shirt of the Renaissance Period slid into view at eye level as I was standing in a circle of my friends. I tilted my head upward to meet the large middle-aged man’s gaze. Thin lines of lavender set his lips apart from the rest of a ruddy, sweaty face, and the curly, black nylon wig he wore hung below his shoulders in little cascades. However, neither of these observations tempered the suffocating closeness of his breasts to my face.

“Oh, you don’t want to go there,” he said waving a loose finger at our map.

I was visibly flustered. “Where do we want to go?”

“You want to go where the fun’s at.”

“Where’s the fun at?”

“The fun’s where you are.” He stood there expectantly for a moment and looked around … Read more

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurleif/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

There are too many stimuli and no way to unhook from the Delivery System.  Every thirty seconds or so, TweetDeck chirps and notifies me that some Twitter entity or another has posted something to the web.  Facebook is running and constantly updating itself with video, status updates, and one friend who is rebuking me for becoming part of the background noise.  He doesn’t know that I’ve downloaded the Twitter plug-in that updates my Facebook status whenever I write a tweet, nor does he know that Brief, my Firefox RSS reader, keeps flashing feed updates at me for no good reason.  If I am constantly disseminating information, it is, perhaps, only as a form of purgation lest I suffer neuronal overload and slip into a vegetative state.

I can’t help it.  Neither can most of us who’ve fallen victim.  That we will suffer enlarged … Read more