Current events

As you may or may not have noticed, I have officially spent money on Hobbsblog II. Yes, I've paid to shut off the ads. They irritated me to no end, whether they bugged you or not. I hated waiting for a damn banner to load to see my site, and the irritation finally won over my niggardliness last night. However, the improvement in performance will likely not be noticed, as I decided to add the discussion function again, which will likely mean no difference in load times. On the whole I'm happy with it.

I also decided to re-start the Debater's Corner sub-blog, mainly to keep my debate stories and digressions off HBII and localized. Now I just need to figure out what to do with my other side project, the Dynamic Storytelling Blog, which started strong but ran out of collaborator desire to keep it going. I'm considering a few options, including turning it into my own personal free form serial fiction blog, starting a new story with new collaborators, and just deleting the whole thing. Either email me or discuss what you think I should do.

Several updates

The place where "What Would Jesus Do" originated was in a novella called "In His Steps" by Charles Sheldon, 1896. Mom also points out another example of why the Cochlear implant phenomenon enrages the Deaf community: insurance will cover CI but not hearing aids. For most Deaf folks, hearing aids are an immense help in getting around in the hearing world but as anyone who either has hearing aids or knows someone who does, they're terribly expensive. An update on the Bush as Republican proxy: he will no longer do formal press conferences. Surprised? Me neither; all you had to do was watch his performance at any of these and you knew he just never performed the way his handlers wanted him to. Speaking of handlers, his number one attack dog, Ari Fleischer, has been using his position as press secretary to claim reporters are in error and stories about Dubya are false when in fact they aren't. In doing this, apparently Fleischer is relying on Clintonesque verb parsing to differentiate between say, a plan and a proposal, to criticize media reports of the administration. I guess it depends on what the definition of "is" is.

Cool links for your edification

An academic view of modern courtship presenting several different points of view. The portion that deals with Evolutionary Psychology is especially interesting, including such tidbits as….

Given these courtship dynamics, sociobiology predicts the emergence of a "marriage gradient" with women "marrying up" and men "marrying down." This puts a "marriage squeeze" on high-status women. High-status males have an immense pool of potential female mates from which to choose, but high-status women seeking to "marry up" face a very restricted pool of available males. The male tendency to "marry down" tends further to sideline high-status females. Feminists often disparage this pattern as a patriarchal strategy aimed at female subordination: Men socially entrench the subordination of women by marrying down and ruling over their younger and lower-status women. This male strategy also contributes to the social marginalization of high-achieving women.

A neat pictorial illustration about how it's cars, not people, that create overcrowding. This is so true; and it's a vicious cycle. As metro areas get bigger, the ability of people to walk and bike to their work and businesses is diminshed, which means you need to drive more, which means everything gets more overcrowded, which means you need to move farther away. From the provocative Randomwalks, a lefty blog that I've been reading for well over a year.


Finally, why the interest in Cremonese Viols as collectibles mean musicians can't afford to play them. Another great link from Catherine. I play the Viola, and have been looking for a community orchestra. If you know of one in St. Paul that I should go check out let me know.