The ‘Save Vanishing Species’ stamps with Amul tiger cubs on.And here’s a neat picture I found on Facebook (looks like it was originally from Galera News Agency) .. see if you can spot the cat in the picture. Hint : it is a leopard.
(The heading is a play on the 1970s advertising hall-of-fame slogan from the Esso gasoline commercials that said ‘there’s a tiger in my tank’). The stamps to save some vanishing species such as the tiger are not new; they were issued in 2011 already. But they were the nicest ones the post office had when I sent out something in a bubble envelope, and I couldn’t resist. (The tiger figure is part of my very limited animal figure collection). Scientists are closing in on their ability to bring extinct species back, though – even ice age mammals like the woolly mammoth. I fear the way it’s going now the poor creatures will have no ice, of course.
(Wednesday) I was waiting at the doctor’s office yesterday when someone came in with a cute mid-size dog in tow. What breed of dog is he? I asked. I couldn’t make out what the man was saying, but did not want to ask again. And at home my on-line searches for dog breeds called cay-son or kashun produced nothing.
(Today, Thursday) I find myself in another office building and purely by coincidence there is a dog book on the coffee table. Alright! Let me see if I can spot the dog I saw yesterday, I thought. And there it was : a keeshond. What threw me completely off the scent was the Dutch pronunciation of ‘kayz-hond’. In my native Afrikaans we say ‘keeshond’ as in ‘leery’.
The keeshond is a very cute dog.Read over my shoulder to learn more of the keeshond.
From Up On Poppy Hill is set in Japan in the 1960s. The film was released only recently in the USA; it premiered on July 16, 2011 in Japan.
This poster for a new animated movie From Up On Poppy Hill is from a lamp post here on 15th Ave in Capitol Hill. Hmm, I thought, those little faces look awfully like those of the characters in the animated series Heidi* that we had in South Africa in the 70s, I thought. Sure enough, this is a ‘Goro Miyazaki’ film .. and he is the son of Hayao Miyazaki that produced the original Heidi series. The elder Miyazaki is one of Japan’s greatest animation directors.
*At the time, one of my colleagues at work told us that his daughter started crying when one of the Heidi episodes started on the TV. Why are you sad when Heidi is so happy? he asked her. Well, she knew that episode would soon end, and then she would have to wait a whole long week for the next one. Aww.
I’m happy that April 1 has come and gone, so that all the technical tomfoolery is now out of the way. Google released an April Fools video announcing ‘Google Blue’, a version of Google Mail that has been ‘years in the works’ (but it turns out all it does is be blue). Some commentators point out they are probably poking fun at a version of Windows 8 called Windows Blue that’s slated for release later this year. Google also offered a ‘Treasure’ mode of their maps and its new odor service called ‘Google Nose Beta’, with which you could search for odors or smells which would appear through your computer so that you could smell it. On Sunday, Twitter announced it will no longer allow the use of vowels in tweets, and that users will have to buy them. (Not true). Check out Joan Rivers’ creative response below.
A same-sex marriage marriage certificate issued in San Francisco [Source : Wikipedia].This is my little ‘meme’ that I made for Marriage Equality from a toy figure I have in my kitchen. The policeman says ‘Don’t Drink and Drive! and ‘Marriage Equality!’ (The gay-rights organization Human Rights Campaign issued the red-and-pink version of their normally yellow on blue equal sign logo, and people took to Facebook and Twitter and posted hundreds of personalized versions of it).
Sketch of Justice Ginsberg that appeared on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.
Tuesday and Wednesday this week was a Supreme Court Superbowl of sorts with high-profile lawyers going before the highest court in the United States to makes their cases for and against ‘Prop 8’ (Tuesday) and DOMA (Wednesday). Prop 8 is short-hand for California’s Proposition 8 from the 2008 state elections there, that was approved and eliminated the rights of same-sex couples to marry there, leaving some 4,000 marriages already performed in legal limbo. However, Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional by a US District court judge. The Supreme Court agreed to hear it. DOMA stands for the 1996 US Congress’s Defense of Marriage Act, stipulating that the federal government is not allowed by law, to recognize same-sex marriages from the States. There are about 1,100 benefits and privileges that come with marriage, so this is not a trivial matter if you are a gay person with a partner you want to marry or are married to already, under your State laws. (Some states allow ‘civil unions’ or domestic partnerships. Most others have explicitly banned it. Go west young man! or young woman, as that classic YMCA song says). So .. how to sort all of this out? ‘When did same-sex marriages become ‘unconstitutional’? asked conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, expressing his sceptisicm. But here is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg at a later point .. my answer would have been, Mr. Clement, (the lawyer arguing for upholding the Defense of Marriage Act), if we are totally for the States’ decision that there is a marriage between two people, for the federal government then to come in to say no joint return, no marital deduction, no Social Security benefits; your spouse is very sick but you can’t get leave; people—if that set of attributes, one might well ask, What kind of marriage is this?” Then Justice Ginsburg answered her own question. Under DOMA there were “two kinds of marriage; the full marriage, and then this sort of skim-milk marriage.” The Supreme Court should issue their ruling on both cases by June. Most legal pundits that hazard a guess at each of the outcomes say that first, for Prop 8, it sounds as if they will simply say that they are not going to issue a ruling. (It’s complicated and there are issues of ‘standing’ .. since the California Attorney General and Governor both declined to defend Prop 8, could the proponents of Prop 8 defend it in front of the Supreme court?). So if the Supreme Court does not issue a ruling, then the overturn of Prop 8 stands and same-sex marriages are good to be recognized (again) in California. As for DOMA, it appears that a majority of the nine Supreme Court judges will rule it unconstitutional .. or at least rule that the Federal government has to recognize all marriages sanctioned by the States. That would still leave same-sex couples in those States that currently ban same-sex marriage worse off, but hopefully those bans will also be overturned in time. The wheels of justice turn slowly.
This chart showing the 9 pink states where same-sex marriage is legal, is from http://statesthatallowgaymarriage.com/
A brilliant yellow daffodil (Narcissus) in a yard a few blocks from my house.
Daffodils are popular here in my neighborhood, and most are in full spring bloom right now. The bulb flower’s is derived from an earlier name ‘affodell’ and the probable source of the d in the front is the Dutch article ‘de’. So ‘de affodell’ became daffodil. Legend also has it that the plant sprang from the site where Narcissus became so obsessed with his own reflection as he knelt and gazed into a pool of water, that he fell in and drowned. That is where the genus name of Narcissus for the plant, comes from.
I couldn’t resist buying the Sunday Wall Street Journal when I saw this elephant picture in the ‘Review’ section. It is an Indian elephant : the African ones don’t have the speckled skins. The article makes the point that experiments designed to test animals’ thinking should keep their physiology in mind. Chimpanzees will readily use sticks as tools to reach food. Elephants do not, but are not dumb, since holding the stick with its trunk closes its ‘nose’; and it cannot smell the food that way. But they will go find crates from far away to step on, to reach food that was placed out of reach. The article also mentions that animals can be extremely keen observers of human body language – as was the case of Kluger (Clever) Hans the German horse of a century ago, that ‘could do math’. An audience would say ‘3 + 4!’ and Hans would tap seven times with his hoof. The secret was that he watched his owner very closely for a signal that the correct answer was reached.
Mr Elephant looks very pensive, somewhat sad? Picture from the review section of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal.
The Hobbit is out on Blu-ray and I got to see it last night. It makes a fine prequel to the Lord of the Rings movies, with out-of-this world characters (of course : they’re from Middle Earth), and some wild battle scenes with the Orcs. The ‘unexpected journey’ takes a lot of twists and turns. Some of the turns take a little too long, though. The total movie time comes to 170 minutes. As for the characters, I liked the ogres around the fire, and afterwards I looked up the name of the foul, uncouth and bloated ‘king’ villain in the mountain (I have not read The Hobbit and I am not familiar with the Middle Earth characters at all! ). It turns out he is named Gorkin the Goblin King. I was shocked to learn the character is played by none other than -ready for this?- the Australian actor behind the outrageous stage show character ‘Dame Edna’, Barry Humphries (a sprightly 77).
*In March 2012, Humphries announced Dame Edna’s retirement from show business.
Gorkin the Goblin King leans in close to make a point with the dwarfs in The Hobbit. I am sure when he does that, he invades one’s personal space in a very big way!Here is a picture of Barry Humphries portraying ‘Dame Edna’ with her trade-mark lilac hair and bejeweled spectacles.
The link below is to one of many articles doing the rounds on-line, commenting on the 10-year anniversary this week of the USA’s invasion of Iraq. Sure : there are neo-conservatives saying the Iraq-Afghanistan wars should not have been ended. There is a documentary out this week by public broadcaster PBS about Pres. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney in which he stands by his views with no apology whatsoever. He still believes a president should have virtually unlimited wartime power. I am a pacifist. Like someone said, wars do not determine what is right; they just determine what is left.
From the article : Ten years after the first American bombs fell on Baghdad, the United States is still paying the costs for the invasion of Iraq — monetarily, strategically, psychologically and morally. The decision to launch the war is sure to be re-debated ad nauseum over the coming days, but the simple reality is that the United States …
Happy St Patrick’s Day to everyone! I have ancestors from Wales, but as far as I know none from Ireland – but we’re all Irish on St Patrick’s Day, is that not right?
This enormous green beer balloon with a three-leaf clover* adorns the Harp Lager (Irish beer) display in the grocery store here by me. Three or four leaf clovers? Well, it’s usually three. The four leaf variety occurs only in 1 in 10,000 little clovers. Four-leaf clovers were Celtic charms, presumed to offer magical protection and ward off bad luck.
I mentioned the internet meme ‘longcat’ in a previous post. Now there’s grumpy cat. Grumpy Cat lives in Arizona and she has her own Facebook page (of course). The kittty was even flown to the South by Southwest® (SXSW®) conference/ festival in Austin Texas* this week to make an appearance there.
*Running this year from Mar 8-17 it is an annual festival of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Twitter took the show by storm as a start-up in 2007, and Foursquare did the same in 2009. (Foursquare lets social media users ‘check in’ at places such as restaurants and recommend then to friends. But lately there has been no big buzz start-ups emerging from SXSW.
Thursday 3.14 has now come and gone (it’s Friday morning here in the USA), but I was reminded yesterday that it was ‘Pi(e) Day’ : the 25th Annual Pi Day, actually. Pi Day celebrates the curious mathematical constant that says no matter how small or how large a circle is, its circumference is 3.14* times its diameter. There is even a geeky website for Pi day, at http://www.piday.org. They have a cute t-shirt picture on there that shows 3.14 can be made to read ‘pie’ when looked at in the mirror. There is also a page that shows pi to a million decimal places.
*3.14 is just the approximate value. The constant is an irrational number which means it has an infinite amount of decimal places with no pattern.
T-shirt picture from http://www.piday.org that shows ‘3.14’ can be made to read ‘pie’ when looked at in the mirror. I want one!
A classic useless machine featured in Wednesday’s edition of Wall Street Journal. You turn it ‘on’, and the ‘machine’ opens up and turns itself off.
No, it’s not that printer on your desk that has stopped working. This type of machine is specifically designed to have ‘no use’. It seems to me that a classic version of a useless machine is the one featured in Wednesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. The original one was invented in the 1950s by artificial-intelligence expert Marvin Minsky at Bell Laboratories, no less. Check out a video of the machine in action at the website Frivolous Engineering at http://frivolousengineering.com/ .
P.S. If the machine provides its owner with titillation, I would argue it is not a useless machine!
(This is a late post). I found and snapped these pictures from a documentary on NHK World’s website www.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/. It started out with the incredible colored ivory carvings of artist Ando Rokuzan (1885-1955). I couldn’t find any of his artwork on-line .. probably because the texts for it are in Japanese. No detail was too tiny. They don’t know how he colored the ivory, and the tools that he used must have been ones he made himself. But then the curator of the art museum told the journalist of an artist called Fuyiki Maehara that lives nearby that makes wood carvings of real-life items : a tin can with an open lid and a branch with berries in it; a barbed wire; the shell of a dead cicada bug. He carved out the inside to make it hollow, carved out the detail on the wings, carved the legs of the insect — out of a single chunk of wood. He makes his tools with the same techniques that were used centuries ago to make samurai swords. Is it art, to make something that looks exactly like the thing for real? Why does the artist do it? asked the journalist. ‘I love doing it .. and to see if I could’, was the reply.
The website standardtime.com is making the case for eliminating Daylight Savings Time altogether. From the website : ‘Stop “Spring Forward, Fall Back. Pick a Time, and Stick with It!’
We have sprung forward in time here in the USA last night at 2 am. My iPhone, iPad and computers are up to the task to recognize that, but I have a lot of clocks in the house that are still disconnected and oblivious to such arbitrary disconnections in time-keeping. So I have to jump in and set their little hands (or digits) forward to reflect the correct time. Daylight Savings Time is now active for such a long time (eight months, until Nov 3) that we might as well pick one time and stick with it. That is the case that the web site standardtime.com is making.
A round-up of the clocks I found in my house (more are hiding in drawers and dressers but I let them be). Clock-wise (pun intended) from top-left : wrist watch and iPhone, home phone, thermostat, oven, guest room alarm clock, desktop computer, Toyota Camry clock, alarm clock, microwave oven clock, TV, bathroom clock, kitchen clock.As the world turns .. the ‘World Clock’ on my iPad gives the times and weather at a glance.
Pronounce Krall-yay-vi-tsa is a harbor town with an island called Krk (yes, no vowels!) across from it in the Mediterranean. The WSC stands for the World Sodoku Championship which was held just before the WPC.The puzzle solvers hard at work. The event is not really suited for television, but this year’s event will take place in Beijing, and maybe China’s CCTV can find a way to make it interesting for viewers. Here is the Loop Splitter puzzle ..
I knew there was a World Scrabble Championship, but not a World Puzzle Championship. TIME magazine recently wrote about the 21st WPC (here is the URL http://wscwpc2012.org) .. the latest one was held October of last year in Croatia. (The East Europeans like their puzzles, but the American team did very well, with Thomas Snyder and Palmer Mebane placing second and third after the winner Ulrich Voigt, a German). The instructions for the puzzles are very simple .. but the method to the madness needed to solve them, another matter. One cannot solve the puzzles by brute force, since humans are not computers (and the puzzle solvers have none at hand). So they have to come up with the heuristics – the process or method – out to solve the problem.
.. or some math for you? The colons should be division symbols, I believe.And a true puzzle to solve. I don’t think the solvers have scissors to cut out pieces of paper! They have to rotate the pieces at they draw them (or before? twist it in their minds?).
Since I work for an auditing firm, the are graciously helping out with the preparation of my federal tax return. (They did send me to China in 2012 which very much complicates the federal tax return, but the help is still appreciated). I still have to fill out an intimidating questionnaire, since the 2013 federal tax code is very different, very much more complicated than the very first one issued in the USA 100 years ago in 1913, which was all of four pages. Check it out below .. pictures and commentary I got from a recent Sunday edition of the New York Times.
The Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts – as well as World War I – resulted in lawmakers instituting a permanent federal income tax in 1913. (A temporary income tax was instituted in 1861 to defray the costs of the Civil War).In the early years it was up to individuals to report an estimate of their earnings and write a check.All forms of interest were deductable e in those days.The United States taxes the world-wide income of its citizens, one of only a few countries to do so.
Since I no longer travel to China – and will not for the foreseeable future – I had to make special arrangements to get this year’s ‘bearista’ bear issued by Starbucks. The Chinese zodiac bears are only sold in China*. So a colleague of mine that still traveled there got one on his last trip out, and put it in the mail for me when he got back to New York City. And there they are – four now – on my dining room table.
*Yes, they could be bought on Ebay, but most sellers cautioned that there might be delays at customs, and that the shipping would be expensive
The Starbucks ‘bearista’ bears from 2010 {Year of the Tiger), 2011 (Year of the Rabbit), 2012 (Year of the Dragon) and 2013 (Year of the Snake)
As the year 2013 careens toward March 1st, the US Congress’s latest self-induced budget/spending/deficit/call-it-what-you-will crisis (oh, it’s called ‘The Sequester’) is about to kick in. What is it? It is $85 billion of spending cuts across the board. So everything gets hit proportionally : teachers and schools, work-study jobs, kids in Head Start, the military, law enforcement, child care assistance, vaccines for children, public health programs, nutrition assistance for seniors, the STOP Violence Against Women Program, clean air and water programs. It’s a very dumb way to cut spending – but the United States of America has to find a way to start spending less money and at the same time get more money into Uncle Sam’s coffers through tax reforms.
Some perspective around that $85 billion amount of money. I found this mouth-watering pie chart (or stomach-churning, looking at the numbers?) on the Investors Business Daily website. The artist is Michael Ramirez. P.S. The pies are actually not comparing the same numbers. Did the cartoonist know that in 2007 – with his comment in parentheses that the Republicans controlled Congress – President Bush’s two $1 trillion wars were still funded ‘off the books’, outside of the official budget? Pres. Obama insisted in 2009 that ALL military spending be brought into the budget. Hence the apparent percentage difference in the deficits shown in the two pies.
I am no Oscars-host expert, but I am sure Seth MacFarlane made a record number of non-politically correct jokes last night. Some were downright offensive, I thought.
First Lady Michelle Obama made a surprise cameo by announcing the Best Picture award via a video link. Movie producer Harvey Weinstein is said to have arranged it. My first reaction was – oh my, is this not going overboard given that Argo* is about the US government, Hollywood, and the link between the two? And of course political commentators on the right made a lot of hay about the First Lady’s appearance at the Oscars. But as someone said today, she is everyone’s First Lady, the 2012 election is just behind us, she did not invite herself, and Ronald Reagan and other presidents have also made cameo appearances at the Oscars.
*[From Wikipedia] Argo is a 2012 American fictionalized thriller film directed by Ben Affleck. This dramatization is adapted from the book The Master of Disguise by CIA operative Tony Mendez, and Joshuah Berman’s 2007 Wired article ‘The Great Escape’ about the ‘Canadian Caper’ in which Mendez led the rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran, Iran, during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.
