Eight Blind Scorpions

Well, they're not all scorpions, but they're all blind. A quarry in Israel uncovered a cave which had apparently been sealed off for millions of years (or so the scientists say). The scientists found eight previously undiscovered species of invertebrates, some crustaceans and some scorpions.

But, since none of them had seen the light of day for millions of years, they have no eyes. Just another useless appendage that got ignored during breeding. Or maybe the blind ones coped better in the darkness than the sighted ones and thus had more children.

I bet if they start breeding these species in daylight, eventually sight would return. The code is in the DNA. It just needs to be retrieved.

Blargh

I want to go back to bed.

It was raining all weekend and now it's a sunny morning.

Ni! Ni! Ni!

One song that I quite often find myself singing is "Ya Te Buckety" by wise old King Otto of Happy Valley:

Ya te buckety
Rum ting too
Ni ni ni
Yaoooo!

Of course, when I sing it, it goes more like this:

Yow dee buggerdy
Rum ting f-too
Ni! Ni! Ni!
Yaooooo!

La dee buggerdy
Rum ting f-too
Ni! Ni! Ni!
Yaoooooooooo!

King Otto is well known for this song, but he is also famous for having put to death all the trade union leaders within his kingdom.

Friday!

Okay, I'm wearing jeans today. Are you happy?

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Culture Clash

When the English first came to North America, they conquered land. When the Spaniards first came to North America, they conquered people. The causes of this are probably in some history of the old continent, but I only care about the effects on the new.

The English built walls and fences of stone and wood to stake their claims, saying, "This is my land, here, within this boundary. I don't care if you were here first; get out." This method of declaring ownership of land is still very much in effect in the U.S.

The Spaniards built missions and declared, "I don't care if you had your own religion and culture; you must now become proper Christian Spaniards." And the conquerors soon has plenty of laborers.

Of course, any native in either situation who disagreed had an appointment with the conqueror's military.

Do you yet see where I'm going with this? Of course you do: U.S.-Mexico relations and that whole immigration thing. The Mexicans have the cultural history of just walking to a new place and saying, "You must now become good Mexicans." The U.S. have the cultural history of building a wall (or just drawing a line on a map) and expecting everybody to stay out.

Where do we go from here? I don't know. But first we might want to recognize that not only don't we speak the same language, we don't speak the same culture.

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Golf

My mini-golf team (which used to be the bowling team) started play last night. On the 18-hole course at Interbay, I scored a 50. One hole-in-one and one six, but a lot of twos and some threes and fours. I was the best on my team, by two points.

The league has now posted the results. My team, Carpe Cervisia (Crap Cervesa), is ranked 13th out of 15!! Yay! Um. . .

If everybody on my team (or at least four of us, since they only took the best 4 scores) did as well as I did, we'd've placed fifth. The best team averaged a 41. I guess I need to work on my putting!

A song you can really sing along with...

Come on, come on, come on
Let's go space truckin'
Come on, come on, come on
Space truckin'

Come on, come on, come on
Let's go space truckin'
Come on, come on, come on
Space truckin'

Yeah yeah yeah

Space truckin'
Yeah yeah yeah

Space truckin'

.

.

.

Space Truckin'
Deep Purple

Black Mountain

I'm sure you're all aware of this by now, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

The Montenegrins have voted to secede from their union with Serbia, thus completely disolving the former Yugoslavia. Montenegro has fewer than a million inhabitants, but I think they'll do all right on their own. At least until they join the EU. . .

What season?

I saw my shadow when I emerged from my hole to go to lunch. It was only for an instant, but does that mean we're going to have six more weeks of winter?

Qwest Bait-and-Switch

When I was first tempted to buy Qwest DSL, the advertised price was $25 for 5 mbps with MSN Premium!! After I talked to the salespeople, I discovered that since I had a Mac, MSN Premium would not work for me. So they gave me plain qwest.net for the low, low price of $37. You see, the $25 price was the promotional price, and they didn't lower all their prices to go with it, just that one. The fact that I was getting less, but paying more, seemed like nothing but a humorous antecdote to the salespeople.

I got my bill Saturday. $48: $38 for the DSL and $10 for the ISP. Plus an additional $12 of MSN Premium charges for April, when the DSL wasn't even hooked up yet. The MSN Premium charges were easy enough to cancel. The mysterious $11 per month, though, was impossible to erase. "I'm sorry," she said, "but whoever quoted you the $37 for combined DSL and qwest.net was just wrong." Yeah, they always are, aren't they? If it were a small company, you'd be able to sue them for fraud, but Qwest is a mega-corporation, and thus they have plausible deniability.

I threatened to cancel my Qwest account completely, and her attitude was, "Just pay this month and goodbye!" But is Comcast really any cheaper? And I'd have to run a cable all the way around my living room to get to my computer from the tv plug.

To top it off, these prices are only guaranteed for twelve months. Then it will jump up to $54, if not more.

Smells Like Waffles

Have any of you ever eaten fried Nutri-Grain bars?