"most" ???

My continuing drone attack watch. Here's a fun little sentence from the online Reuters site.

The United States has launched 48 drone strikes this year, killing more than 400 people, most of them militants, according to a Reuters tally.

Don't you just love the word 'most'?

We ate some fish, most of them good. We executed some criminals, most of them guilty. We torched some houses, most of the inhabitants survived. We talked to some politicians, most of them lied.

Let your fingers do the blogging

There are three Apathy's in the Wellington phone book.

Three people are Sadd

There are seven Joy's

Hope has 29 entries

No-one is Angry.

Cowardly attack?

The recent suicide bombing in Somalia's capital was quickly condemned by the West with the phrase "cowardly attack". This is a phrase that has been used time and again when it comes to suicide bombings, in Iraq and Afghanistan for example, and one I find rather confusing.

I'm a pacifist and coward. But it seems to me that while blowing yourself up could be described as many things, cowardly isn't a good label for it. Stupid? Sure. Deranged? Yup. Depraved? Despicable? Deluded? Mind-bogglingly crazy? All of those. But cowardly?

If I was going to describe any form of attack as cowardly I'd go with piloting drone attack aircraft from the safely of a country hundreds of miles away. That seems cowardly.

It's so removed from the actuality of combat. Sipping a Coke and eating a Big Mac in air-conditioned comfort, the game on a widescreen TV in the background, and Johnson telling that story about the time he met Madonna, while blowing up some 'bad guy', and anyone in the vicinity, half a world away. How is that noble and heroic?

Sensible? Safe? Clever? Maybe. But also cowardly.

Fast count

There's an advert at the moment for the Cranium board game in which they give you two minutes to answer a trivia question.

"Text your answer in the next two minutes ... "

Except they only give you about 50 seconds ... I counted. Twice.

How can you trust a brain game that can't even count to 120?

Thought

Strip mining sounds way more interesting than it actually is.

Stay away from the dangerous inquiry

The big news of the day, at least in my eyes, is the British inquiry into the Iraq war. In my morning news surf I came upon this gem of a paragraph from the Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/6645270/Iraq-inquiry-Britain-rejected-regime-change-as-illegal-in-2001.html).

The inquiry into the war, which cost 179 lives, opened yesterday with a promise from Sir John, a former Whitehall mandarin, to "get to the heart of what happened" and "not shy away" from criticising anyone who made mistakes.

So the first thing to realize is that you don't want to attend this inquiry in person, as you may be one of the 179 lives it takes/has taken. Or is it a new accounting formula, where the price of the inquiry is measured not in dollars, but in lives?

I often wonder how statements like that get past an editor. Even taking it at face value, I'm fairly sure more than 179 lives were 'taken' by the Iraq war. The restriction in the number is, of course, to British servicemen only, but if you are going to limit a number like that I think you are honour bound to include the limiting factor.

And why is this inquiry in the hands of a fruit (mandarin)? Well, that's a noble British tradition from way back.

Run !!

There's a saying I've heard a number of times in various movies and TV shows.

"It's got a taste for human flesh."

This is usually followed by warnings about how the creature/beast/boy raised by wolves/whatever will never stop now that's it has this taste for the sweet succulence of human meat.

I have a problem with this. They say human meat tastes like chicken and I've seen chickens being feed to animals on TV and even at zoos.

If human flesh really does taste like chicken then what the hell are they doing giving these animals a taste for it?

The problem is that the moment these creatures get a bite of a human they stop seeing us as wonderful suppliers of chicken and start looking at us walking plucked chickens ready to eat.

Comedic Inductance

Yesterday I discovered the the unit of Inductance is the Henry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductance

That got me to thinking. People often induce feelings in others in varying degrees. For example, certain comedians are seen as hilarious in anything they do by some, while others struggle to find anything funny in their antics.

There doesn't seem to be an official measure of comedic inductance, so I'm going to suggest one. In honour of Will Ferrel I want to name it the Willy.

A Willy is defined as the average amount of laughter a comedian act, movie, or TV show induces in you. For Will Ferrel, for instance, an individual who thinks that Talladega Nights was hilarious, or that Blades of Glory was the funniest ice skating movie ever would have a large Willy.

I, however, have a small Willy. A very small Willy indeed.

Parallax

I was making up a bottle of formula for the wee one when my mind turned to the notion of parallax. You have to get the amount of water in the bottle near exact, so you turn your head this way and that to make sure the level is right, and not out by 10 millilitres or so because of parallax.

This, of course, got me thinking about the media.

The reality of the world as reported for us is skewed by the parallax introduced by the media. We just don't see things from a level angle any more. If you believe Fox News, and sincerely I hope you do not, then they are the only media source giving you a right wing parallax on events (although also a completely fair and balanced one as well, as they keep repeating to you over and over. We're fair and balanced, the only fair and balanced news, over and over, like a drug addict trying to convince you they are clean ... I swear man, I've given up the shit for good, I just need a few hundred bucks to start turning things around man, honest man, I'm clean. Really, I am. I'm clean.)

Other media, according to Fox, are left-wing biased. I'd like to believe this. I really would. But the Fox idea of left-wing media means one that occasionally lets anyone with a slightly left-wing agenda speak on a program without being pilloried before and after.

The Left is dead. At least in the mainstream. So, unfortunately, everyone that gets their news from the mainstream media has a parallax problem.

It was then I realized I'd forgotten how many scoops of formula powder I'd put into my carefully measured 250mls of lukewarm water.

Damn!

Was I up to two or three of the five scoops?

Staring at the slowly dissolving sticky mess I came to the only fair and balanced conclusion I could reach.

I threw it all out and started again.

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax

Okay, so the photo is just weird ...

My wife and I finally got around to watching the third Star Wars prequel the other day. We didn't expect much, and the movie delivered. Like many a crusty ol' bugger I found the prequels to be rather awful compared to the originals.

Many things bugged me about the prequels. The over-reliance on special effects. The bad attempts at humour. The overt racism. The bad storytelling. The wooden acting. The way Lucas decided the way to make each bad guy seem more evil than the last was to have him use more lightsabers (If there are any more Star Wars movies I predict the next 'Darth' will be an Octopus-alien wielding at least six of them.) The attempts to turn a monarchy into a democracy by having princesses elected (A democracy, mind you, that elects teenage girls to the top job ... Miley Cryus for President anyone?) And, of course, the sudden need for midichlorians to explain how the Force works in a pseudo-scientific rather than pseudo-mystical way (to stop those boycott calls from the Bible belt).

However, I was prepared to let these things all wash over me ... until I had a terrible thought ...

... the prequels mean the original movies make absolutely no sense at all.

Let me clarify. At the end of the prequels the Emperor takes over. He deactivates the vast droid armies with an order. Why? Well, because we don't see them in the next movies is why. There's no logical reason to suddenly get rid of a large army of loyal killing machines. "I just feel like it, and I'm the Emperor. So there."

The children of Darth Vader get split up, for their safety. One of them gets to keep his father's last name and go live with relatives of his father. Just as well Darth never bothers to look up the phonebook. "I have you now, young Skywalker, and all I had to do was let my fingers do the walking."

Obi Wan changes his name to Ben, but keeps his last name. A surname that he doesn't keep secret. Either Kenobi is a common as Smith, or once again the White Pages are all you need to track him down. "Your mastery of the Force is no match for my ability to look things up alphabetically."

Obi Wan is to spend his time training with his old dead master, and keep Luke safe. Of course, he doesn't actually bother to teach Luke anything, and it seems the only trick Qui-Gon teaches Ben is how to come back from the dead. Suddenly the Jedi faith has become akin to a suicide cult. "Luke! Luke! You must drink the spiked Kool-aid, Luke, so you can join us."

When Ben finally does instruct Luke, from beyond the veil, to go get some training, Yoda rightly points out that Luke is too old. The prequels reveal that Luke's father was also too old to start training when he was merely a ten year old. Did no-one think to start the training of the last remaining hope for the Jedi before it was too late? Was life in the swamp and desert, respectively, so exciting for Yoda and Ben that they just lost track of time? "Hmmm, forgot your birthdays, I did. Owe you many presents, I do."

Of course, this brings us to the other major problem ... Leia. There are two 'last hopes' for the universe, the twin offspring of Darth Vader. Yet they just ignore Leia. Why? Because she's a girl? There seem to be plenty of female Jedi in the prequels. Is it just that Ben, Qui-Gon, Yoda, and later Anakin, don't want a girl to join them in their shimmery other world beyond the grave. "Clean up heaven, she would make us. Naked Thursdays embarrassing would be. So no girls in Jedi heaven allowed."

That's my biggest problem with the prequels. They imply that the Ben and Yoda of the original films are idiots who suddenly remember they were meant to be doing something important one day ...

"Oh yeah, we were meant to be saving the universe. Sorry everyone, but I was busy cleaning sand out of my underwear for the last sixteen years and plum forgot."

"Foolish, I feel. In fetid swamp lost track of time, I did. Reading books on grammar, was I. Comprehend them, I did not."

Jelly Shaped Person

My wife was forced by her work to travel to Auckland recently. I say 'forced' advisedly, as she never goes there of her own free will.

She brought back with her some plane food for our wee girl, who treats the overly packaged treats from the skies with the kind of reverence associated with cargo cults.

"Ooooh, plane food, plane food!"

Today's plane food was a Lolly mix. "Sweet Tooth: Enjoy our Kiwi lolly favourites" it proclaimed. By mix they meant a whole two types of candy; Milk Bottles and Jelly Babies.

Milk bottles, a bottle shaped treat that tastes a little like sweetened off milk, took a bit of explaining.

"When Mummy was a girl milk came in bottles ..."

This was greeted with some degree of skepticism.

However, it was the jelly babies that were the most perplexing of the two mixed candies, as the packet called them a "Jelly Shaped Person".

I'll admit that this moniker does suit me. I am, to a degree, a jelly shaped person. However, the jelly babies cut a rather trimmer figure than I do. It was a realistic body shape. The kind that would not lead to body image problems in the minds of children who were exposed to them. There were not Barbie Shaped Jelly People, or even Fashion Model Shaped Jelly People. They were, in fact, People Shaped Jelly Shaped People.

Or if you prefer, People Shaped Jellies.

Global capitalism in your living room

We got a phone call today from, judging from the accent and pronouncement of my last name, a call centre in India. Nothing unusual about that. However, it was about a free dinner at the Johnsonville RSA (Returned Servicepeople's Association) that we had been invited to by personalised* letter the previous week.

This is a new level of co-ordinated attack on our household by global capitalism. The "free dinner" looked to be some multinational time-share scheme presentation pressure cooker cover.

All this made me wonder how many countries were involved in trying to get me to go to dinner at the Johnsonville RSA? Would they be serving a suitably cosmopolitan meal? I was guessing it would just be cheap steak.

Yet all this international effort just for my money. It made me feel wanted. Just not in a good way.

Needless to say we side-stepped the meal. Sometimes a free steak is just not worth chewing over.

*I hope you noticed I keep those sharp z's away from my person as well.

Safety first

Where do you stand on the whole 's' versus 'z' debate in spelling words like organised?

No matter what the rule books and spell checkers tell me I, for one, prefer the soft rounded corners of an 's', as opposed to the jagged, sharp edges of a 'z' next to my organ.

Safety first, even in spelling.

Jaded

Feeling a bit jaded today.

Why is it that "feeling jaded" is a bad thing? I like jade.

In a perfect world ...

When someone tells you they will be back presently ...

... it should mean that they will return soon with presents for you.

When grandpa killed grammar

Sometimes punctuation and spacing can be important.

The penis: mightier than the sword.

Another Random Thought

Too busy not sleeping to think of anything constructive.

However, ...

World leaders who claim they never negotiate with terrorists did not spend any time with their young children.

My random thought for the day.

But not to anyone else

Self-censorship is a wonderful thing. I mean, without it you'd reveal your inner-most secrets, fears and humiliations to everyone. Without self censorship I'd tell you all about the time I ...

... and when I ...

... oh and the fact that porpoises' really ...

... not to mention the ... in the ...

Yes. self censorship is great. It's what keeps all of us together. After all, if I knew what you did that time at the ... when you were with ... and you thought no-one saw, but secretly you hoped someone did because ... was so awesome, and the ... was just perfect. Well, we'd never be able to look each other in the eye again.

Nice shoes, by the way ... leather soles?

Love the red nail polish.

Well, um ... see ya ... I've got to be somewhere else.

To thine own self be true.