gonewest

OK, so maybe careful testing has shown that this particular treatment is safe and can save lives, but isn’t there something just mentally wrong with ensuring that all the lunch meat and poultry we eat is loaded with viruses just to lessen the chance that they harbor harmful bacteria?

And how much do you trust the large food companies? How many years will it be after this precedent is set that we hear the first news stories of large-scale illness or death caused by a new viral additive that turned out to be not quite as harmless as was thought before our ever-so-business-friendly FDA approved it for use?

I must say that organic foods are looking better and better every day; I just hope that the organic standard never gets subverted and rendered meaningless by the agro-lobby.

So, I’m watching Aliens on TNTHD (damn them for stretching pan-n-scanned movies instead of using the original cinematic format on their HD channel, damn them all to hell!) and it’s at the scene where Burke is revealed for the unprincipled profit hungry monster that he is and Ripley says:

You know, Burke, I don’t know which species is worse.

Then Hicks says:

Let’s waste him.

Except that is not the way it goes.

Here is the excerpt from the script:

BURKE
This is total paranoid delusion.
It’s pitiful.

RIPLEY
(wearily)
You know, Burke, I don’t know
which species is worse. You don’t
see them screwing each other over
for a fucking percentage.

HICKS
(serious)
Let’s waste him.
(to Burke)
No offense.

I have seen this movie many, many times over the years and not once have I noticed “You don’t see them screwing each other over for a fucking percentage” to be missing — and it is a very memorable line, I would have noticed. So, why did TNT remove it? Can they really have needed the extra 10 seconds for commercials? Were they technically incompetent unable to bleep out or re-dub that one cuss word as they do for countless other movies?

Or could it be that TNT censored this line in a conscious effort to squelch the message that it sends: that “ambitious corporate types” can be cable of acting in the most unprincipled, even monstrous, ways if they are a little too ambitious or profit hungry? I wonder how many ambitious corporate types they have over at TNT anyway?

Took Friday off so I could enjoy a leisurely three day weekend since I was oncall for the last one. There didn’t seem to be much point in getting out of the house early though because of rain and by noon I was starting to feel a case of flu or something similar coming on, so I ended up sleeping the entire day away instead. What a waste of a vacation day.

Still, I was sick as a dog around midnight but felt fine Saturday morning, so maybe sleeping through Friday got me past that flu and saved the weekend?

There were many boats at the show yesterday that had more interesting layouts and nicer interiors, but there was not a single one that came close to this beauty in terms of personality and classic charm.

Now if I just had the $40k for a down payment…

I walked down to Lake Union yesterday to check out Boats Afloat. This is a biannual event that gives major manufactures and local brokers a chance to show off their boats and try to make some quick deals with the browsing masses. There was everything on display from a moderate collection of trailerables to hundreds of docked boats ranging from affordable day sailers and cruisers to multi-million dollar mega-yachts. Almost all the boats were available for boarding to better gawk at the interiors, but some of the most pricey models (like the $13,000,000 130 foot three deck behemoth present) were available by appointment only — I guess they didn’t want all us normal folks tainting the rarified air that they pump into those floating palaces :-).

There is another event that is held every January or February that I am told is the main show. I think the only difference, though, is that the trailerable section of the show is held in one of the stadium parking lots downtown and so there are a lot more of them on display. I couldn’t haul anything bigger than a [small] dingy with my Miata, so that part of the show has no interest to me at all.

Perusing all the boats on display made me really wish that I hadn’t bought most of the last 50 or so toys (computers, high def TV, GPS units, PDAs, etc, etc) and banked the money instead since I might have been down at that show looking for a live-aboard to buy instead of being just another lookiloo. It is just too difficult to go cold turkey on the geek toy habit, however, so I’ll just have to try to manage it [must not buy ebike, must not buy ebike ...] for the next year or two while I try to get a down payment on a good boat together.

I also picked up a NW edition of Boat Trader while I was at the show. Big, huge, colossal mistake. In just the first five pages I found at least four classic 50+ foot cruisers that would make great liveaboard boats — and the most expensive one was $65k which is a steal compared to new boat prices. I know, old wooden boats mean a lot of elbow grease and expense for repair and upkeep, but there is something about the classic look of many of the boats built from 1920 to 1950 or so that just can’t be matched by today’s builders — and getting something with that classic styling for $20-40k (that would be just the down payment on a $100-200k boat loan) would leave a lot of money for the nearly constant upkeep that an old boat like that would require.

Oh well, guess I just have to be happy dreaming about buying a boat while I try to get the wallet ready. I’m sure you know the old saying: a boat is a hole in the water in which you are constantly throwing money. But if you find the right hole in the water, throwing that money away can be rather satisfying.

MIT has recently started making many of their lectures available over the web (kudos for that and I really must set aside some time to explore the collection). I ran across a post on treehugger (one of my favorite blogs at the moment) with a link to a lecture detailing how we can cut our oil use in half (and completely end oil imports) using only existing technology and without requiring significant extra costs or a change in the “American way of life” (an important requirement since we Americans are too spoiled and too lazy to change how we live).

The video is here (click the Play Now link just above the lecture’s picture). The material is apparently drawn from the lecturer’s book, Winning the Oil Endgame, which I have not yet read.

I have read several of Jonathan’s Raban’s books and enjoyed them all, especially Passage to Juneau. He has a writing style that is notably cultured without being difficult to enjoy. I didn’t know until now that he ever dealt with political topics:

But September 18 is the real date to circle. That day, Congress rushed through its Authorisation For Use of Military Force (AUMF), entitling the President, as the nation’s commander in chief, to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against “those nations, organisations, or persons” that “he determines” were responsible for the September 11 atrocities, “…in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organisations, or persons.”

The essay linked above makes a very important point: everything didn’t change (as we Americans often like to say) on September 11, everything changed a week later when Congress handed semi-dictatorial powers to a president only too happy to abuse them.

A point worth remembering, and one of the first bits of legislation that must be revoked when [fingers and toes crossed] Democrats regain control of Congress in November.

I’ve been using Flock instead of Safari for a month or two now. While I have liked it quite a lot overall, it seems to have the same problem that other Mozilla based web browsers have on this old Powerbook of mine; namely, it is too memory [and possibly CPU] intensive and eventually brings the laptop to a crawl.

Opera dropped its price to $0 not too long ago — I took a quick look at it back then and liked what I saw — but I wasn’t in the mood to switch from Safari at the time, however.

Now that I have decided to “shelve” Flock for a while, I think I’ll give Opera and extended try to see how it fares. So far, it seems to be much less resource intensive than Safari or Flock, but it will take a week or two to verify that.