I am Carole Lombard... classy

Carole Lombard You scored 14% grit, 19% wit, 38% flair, and 42% class!

You're a little bit of a fruitcake, but you always act out in style. You have a good sense of humor, are game for almost anything, but you like to have nice things about you and are attracted to the high life. You're stylish and modern, but you've got a few rough edges that keep you from attaining true sophistication. Your leading men include William Powell, Fredric March, and Clark Gable. Watch out for small planes. Find out what kind of classic leading man you'd make by taking the Classic Leading Man Test.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 33% on grit You scored higher than 16% on wit You scored higher than 55% on flair You scored higher than 99% on class

Link: The Classic Dames Test written by gidgetgoes on OkCupid Free Online Dating

I am Jimmy Stewart... I see Pookas

Jimmy Stewart You scored 21% Tough, 4% Roguish, 61% Friendly, and 14% Charming!

You are the fun and friendly boy next door, the classic nice guy who still manages to get the girl most of the time. You're every nice girl's dreamboat, open and kind, nutty and charming, even a little mischievous at times, but always a real stand up guy. You're dependable and forthright, and women are drawn to your reliability, even as they're dazzled by your sense of adventure and fun. You try to be tough when you need to be, and will gladly stand up for any damsel in distress, but you'd rather catch a girl with a little bit of flair. Your leading ladies include Jean Arthur and Donna Reed, those sweet girl-next-door types. Find out what kind of classic dame you'd make by taking the Classic Dames Test.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 31% on Tough You scored higher than 6% on Roguish You scored higher than 92% on Friendly You scored higher than 17% on Charming

Link: The Classic Leading Man Test written by gidgetgoes on Ok Cupid

Why NOT Sue?

I can't even count the number of times I've read people leaving a job say "yeah, what they did wasn't really legal, but I'm not going to fight it." I'm not saying that they're wrong -- I know that full bore legal action is time and money intensive -- but I do wonder why so many employers get away with breaking the law. These are cases where people incur losses and costs in the thousands, tens of thousands, of dollars: if someone broke into a house and stole that much, it'd be Grand Theft and nobody shrugs that off.

Speaking of job actions: The Times has a plaint by a blogger who thinks that blogging is a sufficient social good that employers should be required to show actual harm before firing a blogging employee. It'd be nice, but I doubt it....

God Bless Nanny....

So, the British are debating whether to require driver licensing for motorized (i.e. electric) wheelchair use.... As the original article points out, the statistics being used to justify this are clearly in the "damned lies" category, but it's amazing what a few legislators or administrators with time on their hands, a bee up their bonnet, and a need to "look productive" can come up with.

Working With Idiots Causes Heart Attacks! Blogging Counteracts Effects!

Well, just because it was in the Weekly World News and nobody's actually studied it, doesn't mean it isn't true!

Maybe they should do a study: do people who read really dumb-ass blogs (that would be a subjective measure of course: forcing subjects to read low-traffic blogs with bad grammar from the other end of the political spectrum would do the trick) have more heart attacks than people who read only blogs they like? Or is blogging an outlet that reduces stress (unless you get too tied up with it, then.... damn. How do you rig a control group with these variables?)?

But seriously

"It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion." -- Popular Usenet .sig

If you want to know what makes us the short-tempered, inattentive, inefficient, stupid people we are, read this survey of current literature on sleep deprivation. How many symptoms of long-term sleep restriction do YOU have?

Shomer Shabbat Godcasting?

The podcast phenomenon has been picked up by religious broadcasters and institutions: sermons are a natural for audio-blogging and mini-player listening. "Godcasting" they call it, apparently. But I was thinking: this could create some serious problems for Shabbat observant Jews (in Hebrew, full observance is called shomer shabbat, usually used as an adjective).

You'd have to have a recording device capable of handling 26 hours (I suppose it could just run out and turn itself off, but that might count as scheduling the extinguishing....) or voice-activated (and is that legal, if you turn it on beforehand, knowing that you'll be triggering it when you speak? Are timers legal?). You can't put it out until after havdalah, of course. Even if you pre-record it, you wouldn't want to put it up before Shabbat, since you wouldn't want to encourage Jews to break Shabbat by downloading and playing computer files, even Torah study.

Nothing too different from the "how do you videotape a bar mitzvah" problem, I suppose (you don't, if you're shomer shabbat; otherwise, you fudge)...

What THE LEFT Wants...

Mr. Jones is, as usual, wrong when he says that "the Left" is afraid of winning (particularly of Bush winning) the war and reconstruction in Iraq. I don't know which left he's been reading but the liberals I read have consistently argued that the problem was twofold: going in for the wrong reasons, and going in with a bad plan. I'd be willing to cut the administration some slack if I thought they were doing something right; I've never argued (nor have I had any tolerance for those who argue) that the stupidity of the rush to war or the misdirection means that the reconstruction of Iraq shouldn't be done right: to the contrary, it is precisely because our justification and planning were so weak that we have an added responsibility to not screw up Iraqis' lives long-term. It's not the war itself that's the problem: it's the half-assed way that it's been carried out (as Mr. Jones and the David Brooks article that he and everyone else will be linking to admit) which makes it not just criminal but an atrocity.

"We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline"

It is the 42nd anniversary of Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have A Dream speech. [text and audio here]

Thanks to Ralph Luker for the reminder. No, Ralph, rhetoric and sentiments like that can never be overexposed in this age of sound bites, spin and liability weasels. I suppose, by being iconic, people tend to look past the words, and by being historical, people assume that it doesn't matter anymore. But some challenges are timeless, and the words ring beautifully on the page and in the heart and mind.

Quotations #071: Long

I normally don't put extended excerpts into my quotation file: it sort of violates the epigrammatic aesthetic. Sometimes, though, there's something that just needs a bit more saying...

We are no better people than our ancestors, though we live in an age in which improvement is seen as the norm and "history" is a place of darkness. We carry our challenges within us but we have to act anyway.

"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead -- as if innocence had ever been -- and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered, and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved." -- Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

What shall we do? We should judge others with clarity, and ourselves unsparingly, and we must choose the right side, when sides must be chosen.

"The history of empire is far too important to be value-free. The rise and fall of empires to a great extent determines which values and ideologies will dominate an era. The study of empire says much about the contemporary global order, its origins, its moral and political bases, and the manner in which in which it may evolve. It is important to study empire in as many-sided, objective and 'sympathetic' a way as one can manage. It is neither possible nor desirable to be neutral about its history. In this subject neutrality would be equivalent to indifference to the fate of the human race. Judgements are inevitably influenced by who one is and by the dominant perspectives and values of the time at which one is writing. The descendent of a West Indian slave may have a rather different perspective on the British Empire from that of a European liberated from Nazi rule by British and imperial armies. It is certainly possible to condemn outright the hideous suffering of those subjected to Stalin's rule but idle to pretend that history would not have mitigated this condemnation had the society he created endured for generations and resulted ultimately in ever higher levels of material prosperity, Soviet global power and even some degree of individual freedom." -- Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals

"You can do anything with children....

if you will only play with them" -- Otto von Bismark

"The idea that a child can be led through play, that it can be done intuitively, is so important to me," she said, adding that her doll's sophisticated technologies must be invisible.

"Business succeeds rather better than the state in imposing its restraints upon individuals, because its imperatives are disguised as choices." -- Walter Hamilton

"We don't want to make kids scared of technology," said Ms. Shackelford, who says she is in her mid-60's and has no children of her own. "You have a baby doll that is supposed to make a little girl feel like the doll loves her. Girls tell dolls all the time that they love them.

"They [Americans] have confused progress with mechanization." -- Lewis Mumford

"This doll," Ms. Shackelford said, "acts like she loves you."

"Parturient mones, nascetur ridiculus mus [Mountains will go into labor, and a silly little mouse will be born]." -- Horace, Ars Poetica