Hobbits!

Remains of a group of little people found in Indonesia, physically distinct from pygmies. The scientists seemed to discount the possibilities of second breakfasts, though, as they attributed the small size to resource-poor population pressure. No mention of hairy feet.

Oreo cookies and Cheese Whiz

Whoo!! I finally made it on this thing. Great idea Matt to get this started! I don't really have anything profound or insightful to share. Just mainly testing this thing out to make sure I can be able to throw in my 2 cents later. Peace out, home slices.

Two quotes from an old issue of Outside magazine

A quote for the Furrowing of the Brow, from an article on the Mustang province of Nepal by Bob Shacochis:

He who gathers knowledge, it is written in Ecclesiastes, gathers pain. And when you romance a dream to death, what remains is a dry residue of absurdity that will mock your passions for all eternity.

[Scene: trying to spot a tiger in India. Best way to do this? Atop an elephant, of course. The elephant's name is the Goddess. The writer is Peter Matthiessen.]

Harsh cries of Mal! Mal! (Go! Go!), enforced by hard cuts of his whistling stick upon her brow knobs and down between her eyes, advised the Goddess to get moving, which she did, but not before relieving herself of a large load of manure, which struck the hard ground like a Turkish ottoman.

I think it was the picture of the Turkish ottoman that got me.

Writer's Almanac-ish Thought

I am stealing time from more important activities to write this...bad Dobby, bad, bad <beats head against wall>...

Poem for the Day:
If, by Rudyard Kipling.

Here's the second stanza:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

and the accompanying thought:

Triumph and disaster, two imposters?
"Not always," the optimist in me said. Now, I think it's like people named Jesus Christ--not always imposters, but the ones you meet out in the world typically are. The real deal is much more subtle.

Unfortunately, spotting the imposters sometimes doesn't help prevent the damage to truth in self-image, or hurt. Consider Winston Churchill, booted out of office just months after helping win World War II. Or Abraham Lincoln, reviled on many sides during the Civil War--"balance" meant making both sides equally angry with him. Sometimes the medium is not happy. I hope yours is, today.

for all you hack philosophers out there...

There IS such a thing as a wrong statement.

Prove me wrong, eh?

Or how about this?

"This statement is false."

Is it true or false?

Hmm. (Apologies to Eubulides and the G.E.B.)

sorry...

First thought: where IS everyone?

Second thought: If there were only three people coming, and one was ten-fifteen minutes late, that makes a big difference. <striking a last-frame-of-qwantz.com pose> Oops!

Third thought: Maybe they went to whatever-it-was on campus that was using lights brighter than the surface of the sun.

Fourth thought: You know those bugs that are attracted to light? Is there some brightness that's just too much? Some point at which they say, "No steenking way, man! That hurts. No pleasure there, just pain"?

Fifth thought: I wonder why they don't burn their little eyes right out of their little heads? If I repeatedly banged my face up against the lens of a floodlight, wouldn't I tend to lose sight after fifteen minutes or so? Do these bugs have some sort of ultra-robust vision system, or are they blind now and moving toward the warmth? (Talk about bad instincts.)

Sixth thought: along the topic of losing-sight, if I were to view a nuclear explosion (the flash), or gaze at the sun, or stare at a welding arc, it would burn my retina. Upon further consideration, I guess I don't fully understand this phenomena. Is that because of unseen infrared wavelengths (that's heat) overheating the lens of the eye, or is it ultraviolet wavelengths (that's a tan) sunburning the eye, or is it the vast quantity of visible-wavelength photons doing something, or is it not a physical meltdown but a burned-out control system? To understand this last alternative, consider stepping from a dark room into the sunlight. Your eyes adjust, so that what initially seems bright does not after a minute or two. Technically, this might happen at the retina before the light is converted to pulses sent to the brain, at the synapses along the way as the pulses travel, and at other points in the brain as everybody gets tired of hearing how bright the sun is today. But maybe for a sight-ending flash, this reaction adjusts light response so low that no future vision is possible? It wouldn't be hard to test the various theories, if you could find some volunteers. Easier to Google the answers.

Ah, well, back to work. It's going to be a late night, and stopping to think these thoughts didn't help matters.