Archive for
August, 2006
August 24th, 2006
Beloit College has released its latest “Mindset List,” to help academics understand what freshmen know — and what they don’t have a clue about. This list has been prepared each August since 1998 and past lists are available online. [“What Your Freshmen Don’t Know” (Inside Higher Ed)]
Here is this year’s list, for the Class of 2010. I’ve bolded the ones that really made me feel old. Which ones make you feel old?
- The Soviet Union has never existed and therefore is about as scary as the student union.
- They have known only two presidents.
- For most of their
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Tags: Freshmen, Soviet Union, U.S. airlines, bankrupt, Manuel Noriega, Germany, DNA, Milli Vanilli, Google, Mr. Rogers, Walter Cronkite, bar codes, Phantom of the Opera, Law & Order, Retin-A, green tea, Waldo, Savings & Loan, Michael Moore, Disney, CNN, Bernard Shaw, Diane Sawyer, Dr. Suess, Richard M. Daley, global warming, virtual pets, Ringo Starr
August 24th, 2006
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
–Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Tags: Quote of the Day
August 23rd, 2006
I don’t know what’s wrong with my cats. I swear!
Out of desperation last night I opened a can of chicken, drained it a little and put it on a plate. I mean, they were on day four of not eating and I couldn’t take it anymore. If they wouldn’t eat the raw food I was trying to feed them, maybe they’d at least eat some canned meat. (I refused to give them that grocery store kibble with it’s disease-ridden meat-part bits and who knows what else!)
At first, things looked good. The two of them
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Tags: Innova Evo, raw food diet, the cats, the puppy
August 23rd, 2006
I just got back from the rheumatologist follow up visit (after having had to sit through 2 hours of a budget meeting this morning).
Apparently, the Lupus blood test came back negative, but my Sed rate is still high at 90. He also doesn’t think it’s Sjögren’s Syndrome based on the blood work and my tear generation test.
So, now he wants to do some studies of my blood vessels to see if I have Takayasu’s Arthritis, which is a really rare disease where your blood vessels shrink. Apparently normally it shows up in Asian women, but he
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Tags: Takayasu's Arteritis, rheumatologist, CAT Scan, Lupus, Sjögren's Syndrome, ESR, cancer, emphysema
August 23rd, 2006
“A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.”
– William Ralf Inge
Tags: Quote of the Day
August 22nd, 2006
Last Wednesday, in Malaga, Spain, some of the passengers of Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 succummed to irrational terror and forced Monach Airlines to eject two other passengers from the flight based on their own version of racial profiling, even though they had all at that point passed security checks. The problem with the two passengers was that they were both in their early 20s, appeared to be Middle Eastern, and were speaking in a foreign language which the other passengers assumed was Arabic; the passengers noted that despite the heat of Malaga, the two men were wearing leather
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Tags: hatred, racism, airport security, Monarch Airlines, United Airlines, Peter Mercer, Dr. Ahmed Farooq, TSA, Raed Jarrar, Global Exhange, JFK airport, We Will Not Be Silent
August 22nd, 2006
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
– Virginia Woolf
Tags: Quote of the Day, Virginia Woolf
August 21st, 2006
No, I’m not talking about Saddam Hussein. I’m talking about my cats.
As of Saturday morning, Pugly, Needy and Aloof are no longer being fed store-bought pet food. I bought them fresh ground turkey and all of the other ingredients necessary, followed one recipe for dogs and one recipe for cats each from Dr. Pitcairn’s New Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats, and proudly set the bowls down.
Pugly,
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Tags: the cats, the puppy, home cooking pet food
August 21st, 2006
I have two things about this blog on my mind today. Actually, they’ve been niggling at me for sometime now.
For one thing, I’m very curious about the people who stop by. I know there are some regulars. I even know some of the regulars “online” names. I’d love to know more. I’d love to know if there are other people. I’d love to encourage people to delurk and introduce themselves (and even whore their blog).
So, I’m going to borrow from my acquaintance, sometimes visitor, the Martian Anthropologist, who asked the wise and age-old question “who are you, reader?”
So,
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Tags: blog whoring
August 21st, 2006
“You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
– Zig Ziglar
Tags: Quote of the Day, Zig Ziglar
August 20th, 2006
“Stuffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it’s worse when they are wearing dark glasses and have streamers in their antlers because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.”
– Ellen DeGeneres
Tags: Quote of the Day, Ellen DeGeneres
August 19th, 2006
There are some Americans who would have you believe that everyone picked up on suspicion of terrorism should forfeit their rights as a human being. Some Americans will tell you that the fact that we are “at war” means that we have the right “to do what we have to do” in order to protect ourselves without apology and without conscience. There are Americans who don’t understand that when we deny other human beings the simple rights that we expect from each other, we stop being human beings ourselves.
The veiled accusations and vehement denials would continue for nearly
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Tags: 9/11, Benemar Benatta, Algeria, detainees, FBI, political assylum, U.S. Immigration
August 19th, 2006
Pugly’s newest trick is to rearrange his environment. You know, move about his bed, spread his toys around, hide my shoes and the remotes, and drag rugs into other rooms. That sort of thing.
He’s also been dragging his little doggy steps to the bed away from the bed and placing them elsewhere in the room, but he hasn’t learned yet that this causes a personal issue.
“Um…hey, can you give me a hand?”
“Hello? Down here!”
“Um…Mom? All of my toys are up there.”
Tags: Pug, the puppy
August 19th, 2006
“Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.”
– Lillian Hellman
Tags: Quote of the Day
August 18th, 2006
- Pugly is losing his baby teeth.
- Pugly is starting to learn the S-I-T command finally.
- I have a UTI and it has triggered just about everything else that’s wrong with me to go haywire; I tried to self-medicate with cranberry juice and vitamins for several weeks. I don’t believe the doctor that one dose of 3 days of Bactrim or whatever it is will solve the problem.
- I watched Who Wants To Be A Superhero? or whatever it’s called last night. I was amused by the fact that one of the guys who got kicked off became a Supervillain. I hope Fat Mama
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Tags: discombobulated
August 18th, 2006
The Boston Globe reports that the technology to detect liquid explosives is already available and, in fact, the White House and the Supreme Court are already using such equipment known as SmartCheck, a low-intensity X-ray scanner made by AS&E that “can spot a bottle of organic compounds in a passenger’s pocket.” That’s pretty impressive actually considering all the people who end up on airplanes with all sorts of things they aren’t supposed to. However,
The TSA has not outfitted airports with the devices, in part, because officials have to prioritize where they spend limited dollars, according
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Tags: George W. Bush, politics, terrorism, Homeland Security, Boston Globe, airport security, AS&E, SmartCheck, TSA
August 18th, 2006
I was looking through an old journal of mine and found this poem by Veronica Shoffstall. My mother gave it to me when I was struggling in college to find my niche, my place, myself I suppose. For some reason, I always come upon in again in my belongings when I most need to be reminded and comforted by its words and meaning — I suppose I find it when I need to learn from it again. Funny thing is that I don’t think I understood at 18 what it was really about; certainly at 35, I
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Tags: Veronica Shoffstall, poetry
August 18th, 2006
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
– Harry S. Truman
Tags: Quote of the Day, Harry S. Truman
August 17th, 2006
As promised, I’m passing on my latest finds…or I’m trying — Pugly is trying to keep me from using the computer –
- DealCatcher – The best thing at DealCatcher is the printable coupons. You know how every now and then someone will send around a printable coupon for Borders or Barnes & Nobles or some theater? DealCatcher collects all of those things all in one handy place. It keeps track of sales from tons of stores plus you can look for product reviews and rebates. Oh, and since I live by my Bloglines feeds, I was downright excited to
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Tags: free, Borders
August 17th, 2006
“The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.”
– Robert Jackson
Tags: Quote of the Day
