Archives for August 2006

Thanks Chaim.

I like the X-Men. Wolverine is probably my favorite character, but this guy takes it too far.

A couple of quotes from The Untouchables:

Malone: You wanna know how you do it? Here’s how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone! Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?

and

Capone: When you got an all-out prizefight, you wait until the fight is over, one guy is left standing. ‘N’ that’s how you know who won.

If I wasn’t so tired I might spend a few minutes discussing how these quotes relate to real life. Ok, maybe I’ll try.

IMO, if you go to war you go with the intention to completely overwhelm the enemy. As Sean Connery’s character illustrates you hit them so hard they cannot conceive of lifting their head up out of the mud. There is no reason to use bombs and bullets unless you wish to kill and if that is your task then you let them wonder if they didn’t start a fight with the devil.

Now if we go with Capone’s commentary we can take two different perspectives. The first is the literal interpretation. Last man standing is the victor.

OTOH, we can argue that it does not have to be taken literally and that a better measure can be assessed after some time has passed. Does the last man standing walk away or do they just collapse from exhaustion. It is something to consider.

More on this later.

“BARICHARA, Colombia – The first loud crackle tastes and feels like popcorn, but by the time the juices spray wildly in your mouth and the filament-like legs slide down your throat, there’s no mistaking this toasted ant queen.

The people of sun-soaked northern Colombia have been eating ants for centuries. They believe the accurately named “hormiga culona” — big-butt queen ant — is everything from a natural form of Viagra to a protein-rich defense against cancer.

Now the invertebrates are going global: A businessman in Santander province exported more than 880 pounds of the inch-long queen ants last year, many of them to be hand-dipped in Belgian chocolate and sold in fancy packaging at $8 for a half dozen at upscale London department stores like Harrods and Fortnum & Mason.

But even as the delicacy begins to expand beyond Colombia, the ants appear to be dwindling in Santander, and that worries the region’s ant-eating bipeds.

This year’s harvest, which usually begins around Easter and lasts as late as June, was one of the worst on record, with peasants in the artist colony of Barichara reporting half their normal year’s haul.

Entomologists say the winter was unusually harsh and spring rains were late, which may have disturbed the virgin queen ants’ nuptial flights — the one time a year when they emerge from their dune-like ant hills to seek a mate and form a new colony. Almost as often, the queens are grabbed by lizards, birds or humans.

Expanding fields of beans, tomatoes and tobacco also have replaced the region’s last remaining wilderness and farmers consider the leaf-cutting ants — the species atta laevigata — to be serious pests.

“It’s an age-old dilemma for the farmer — should I kill it or eat it?”

Click here for the full story.

Last month, we noted that “google” had entered Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. It was a landmark for the search engine — going from nonentity to common usage in only eight years. One would think that a company that existed only in the minds of two college dudes a few years ago would be happy that a major publication such as The Washington Post prominently marked the occasion.

One would, that is, until one got a letter from Google’s trademark lawyer.

Google, evidently, took offense to this passage in last month’s article: “Google, the word, now takes its place alongside the handful of proper nouns that have moved beyond a particular product to become descriptors of an entire sector — generic trademarks.”

This characterization of Google, the letter warned, is “genericide” and should be avoided. Such letters are cranked out every day by companies keen on protecting their trademarks. Wham-O Inc. wants writers to eschew “Frisbee” for “plastic flying disc,” for instance. I’ll note that in my Palm. Excuse me — my “personal digital assistant.”

Google, however, goes the extra mile and provides a helpful list of appropriate and inappropriate uses of its name. To show how hip and down with the kids Google is, the company gets a little wacky with its examples. Here’s one:

” Appropriate: He ego-surfs on the Google search engine to see if he’s listed in the results.

Inappropriate: He googles himself.”

But this one’s our favorite:

Click here for the full story. Hat tip to Tinkerty Tonk.

What a scary man. Footage can be found here and here. Commentary can be found here.