Archives for June 2006

Hat tip to J-Cop

I was wrong about disengagement. Yes, let the record state that I was wrong. At the time I had thought that it was going to be a painful but necessary step in trying to bring peace. I didn’t see it as having immediate results, but saw it as being something that would be part of the process.

Instead I have been proven wrong. The rockets still fly and the attacks continue and the world basically ignores what is going on.

And now with the kidnappings it is time to show a very strong response. The terrorists need to see that the consequences of their actions lead to a response that is too painful to endure.

It is time to go back in and retake Gaza, or at least large sections of it. It wasn’t a great situation before, but it is worse now.

I received the following email:

Dear football hating american. The only reason that you hate the beautiful game is because your bloated and overindulged country is pathetically bad at it. True football is beauty and art that is beloved by the world. Unlike that silly game you play called football. watch and learn well and maybe one day your country will learn how to be a part of nations.

Hmm… I am tempted to post your email address so that you can be overrun by the hordes of the shack. My minions shall feast upon your mortal soul and you shall know no rest.

Ok, that was a little dramatic but so was your note. You’ll notice that I only posted a fragment of it which works because you write in fragments. I don’t know if English is your second language but I hope that it is because your writing is like soccer, atrocious to watch.

I have watched the cup and laughed at the antics and bad acting of the so called players. I laugh at the flops and falls as they beg the officials to penalize the other side.

I am playing around with creating the World Cup of Paint Watching. I figure that we can play that alongside the cup because few people will know the difference.

The best part of a soccer game is watching the fans riot and burn down the stadium every time the other side loses a game. In fact I think that I am going to launch a new business in which I insure the stadiums for ridiculously high premiums.

It’ll be a gold mine.

I thought that this was interesting as well.

Older brothers linked to being gay

“Having one or more older brothers boosts the likelihood of a boy growing up to be gay–an effect due not to social factors, but biological events that occur in their mother’s womb, according to a study published Tuesday.

In an analysis of 905 men and their siblings, Canadian psychologist Anthony Bogaert found no evidence that social interactions among family members play any role in determining whether a man is gay or straight.

The only significant factor was the number of times a mother had previously given birth to boys, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Each older brother increases the chances by 33 percent. Bogaert said that assuming the base rate of homosexuality among men is 2 percent, it would take 11 older brothers to give the next son about a 50-50 chance of being gay.

In a previous study, Bogaert and his colleagues estimated that about one in seven gay men in North America–roughly 1 million people–can attribute their sexual orientation to fraternal birth order.

Bogaert said he doesn’t know what mechanism is behind the effect, which he and a colleague first identified 10 years ago.”

I thought that this was kind of interesting. I never had one, but a lot of my friends did.

FRESNO — Robert Bernardo spent a week this spring traveling the Pacific Northwest, trying to save part of yesterday’s future.

The high school English teacher swung through Portland and Astoria, Ore., and then on to Ethel, Wash., to drop off a collection of antiquated computers — a PET8032, three VIC-20s, an SX-64 portable and a Commodore 128D.Then on his way home to the Central Valley town of Visalia, Bernardo packed his white Crown Victoria with three more SX-64s, boxes of software and a couple of printers.

With any luck, this agglomeration of decades-old circuit boards and dusty disk drives will allow Bernardo to reboot a handful of computers made by the long-defunct Commodore Business Machines.

In an era when a home computer’s power is measured in gigabytes, Bernardo still counts kilobytes as a devoted Commodore user 12 years after the last machine was assembled.

Once the largest personal computer maker in America, the company behind the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 introduced millions of people like Bernardo to the digital age. The company went out of business in 1994, but its legacy survives in dozens of Commodore clubs around the country.

Bernardo presides over the Fresno chapter.

Never mind that the VIC-20 has so little usable memory — just 3.5 kilobytes — that it can store only a couple of pages of text in its buffers. Or that Commodore hardware was notoriously clunky and buggy. Bernardo still manages all his e-mail on a 1980s-vintage Commodore 64.

“I’ve never considered the Commodore obsolete,” Bernardo said. “I can still do many things with it — e-mail, browse the Web, word processing, desktop publishing and newsletters. I still do games on it: new games that are copyright 2006, ordered from Germany.”

Like classic car fans, Bernardo and other Central Valley Commodore devotees lug their gear every month to the Pizza Pit restaurant and put the hoods up, so to speak. For many, a Commodore machine was their first computer. They cherish their machines the way some guys pamper their high school hot rod.

Woohoo!!