Because we successfully finished a project for a large and important customer, our manager took us out to lunch at a Brazilian steakhouse yesterday. Contrary to what I was expecting, there was no waxing involved. Instead, there was a large salad bar full of things you don't find in the typical salad bar: fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers, eggplant, etc.. It was really more of an antipasti bar than a salad bar, since it was intended as a small first course, not as a way to fill up on lettuce and gobs of creamy ranch dressing.

After we finished our salads, we turned the handy "Yes, Please", "No Thanks" discs next to our plate to "Yes, Please", as instructed. And at that point, the Parade of Meat began.

First, a guy came out with two huge meat-laden skewers: one with small pork sausages, one with pieces of chicken. I took one of each. Delicious! Then another man appeared with a huge grilled and skewered leg of lamb; he carved me off a slice of that. Lambtastic! A couple minutes later, a man came out with a skewered flank steak; I had a slice of that. Garlicky! Then another guy with a huge grilled skirt steak - I was starting to feel very very full, so I asked for a small piece; instead, he gave me a huge 3/4lb chunk of very rare, blood-dripping, flesh. The tablecloth was splattered with drops of hot blood. My corner of the table looked like a crime scene. Nonetheless, I started in on it. Then I flipped my disc to "No Thanks" and began to moan, engorged. Then a guy came out with bacon-wrapped filets; now how could I say no to that ? Then, another guy came out with the final meat, the restaurant's specialty: steak! Top sirloin steak, in fact. It was excellent! So, that makes seven meats, not counting the salmon and pork (from the black beans, pork and rice) I got from the salad bar. Then there was dessert.

I didn't eat another thing for 19 hours. I am a true glutton.

(title thanks to Hilkka)

Was it divine intervention or gradual evolution ? A Canadian Perspective.

The opponents of Wrathful Dispersion maintain that it is really just Babelism, rechristened so that it might fly under the radar of those who insist that religion has no place in the state-funded classroom. Babelism was clearly rooted in the Judeo-Christian story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9); it held that the whole array of modern languages was created by God at a single stroke, for the immediate purpose of disrupting humanity's hubristic attempt to build a tower that would reach to heaven: "Let us go down," God says to Himself, "and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." Wrathful Dispersion is couched in more cautiously neutral language; rather than tying linguistic diversity to a specific biblical event, it merely argues that the differences among modern languages are too perverse to have arisen spontaneously, and must therefore be the work of some wrathful (and powerful) disperser who deliberately set out to accomplish a confusion of tongues.

I laugh. I'm a geek.

(via ObWi)

I heard the news today, oh boy.

I heard from my father that one of my high school friends whom I haven't spoken to since graduation day, 17 years ago, went to college for some combination of aviation and architecture and is now the lead engineer on some project at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Wow. Good for him.

And, I heard that another of my high school friends, whom I think I saw once, the year after graduation, was just arrested for persuading two girls, 11 and 17, into having sex, and for distributing photographs of the event, a.k.a. producing and distributing child pornography. Whew. That sucks. He was a good guy, when I knew him back in high school; a bit of a trouble-maker, smart, bored with school, musically gifted and restless (ya know, a high school kid). We were pretty close, and I never would've guessed he'd do anything like that. But, I guess a lot can change in the time it takes to double your age.

The blogger in me wants to link to the on-line newspaper article, simply because bloggers like to reference the things they talk about, when there's a link available. But the rest of me is a mixture of shame, fear of being associated (even 17 years out), sadness, and most importantly wanting to spare his family whatever possible grief any more attention could bring.

Jason Zengerle to Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes), you're no Dylan.

Fair enough, but the title of the piece is "Why there's no good protest music anymore[?]". To me, that says the author just isn't listening to much nwe music. Off the top of my head:

• Stereolab - their lyrics are packed full of protest against war and economic and social injustice. Yes, they're overtly Marxist and half-French, but they're still protesting.
• Most of hip-hop. Once you lop off the Top-40 and silly macho bling shit, you're left with a lot of rappers rapping seriously about racial injustice, and economic issues. Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, NWA, Black Star, Tribe Called Quest. Eminem's "Mosh".
• Green Day - "American Idiot" ?
• Sleater-Kinney
• Bruce Springsteen
• Steve Earl
• John Mellencamp - a lot of his non-'hit' songs are about the slow decay of the American mid-west.
• John Prine - his whole career.

I'm sure there are a half-dozen more sitting in my iPod. No, they're not Dylan, but even Bob himself wasn't that Dylan his entire career.

(via Matt Yglesias)

#10: If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death.

#11: Chuck Norris once ate three 72 oz. steaks in one hour. He spent the first 45 minutes having sex with his waitress.

Go read them all, now.

The MR T version is good, too:

#2: Every time a church bell rings, Mr. T pities a fool.

#29: Despite popular belief, if there is a fool in the woods, and nobody is around to hear his jibba jabba, Mr. T is still able to pity him.

Oh, and the Vin Diesel one is good, as well:

#4: There is no "I" in team. There are two "I"s in Vin Diesel. Fuck you, team.

#7: When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night he checks his closet for Vin Diesel.

#38: Vin Diesel invented black. In fact, he invented the entire spectrum of visible light. Except pink. Tom Cruise invented pink.

Yesterday's Scientology exploration was interesting. But I want to know more! So, let's go right to the source: L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology:

It is fairly well accepted in these times that life in all forms evolved from the basic building blocks, the virus and the cell. Its only relevance to dianetics is that such a proposition works — and actually that is all we ask of dianetics. There is no point to writing here a past tome on biology and evolution. We can add some chapters to those things, but Charles Darwin did his job well, and the fundamental principles of evolution can be found in his and other works.

L. Ron. Hubbard, from his book, Dianetics

OK, not bad. But, that was early in his career. He changes his tune later on:

The effort to explain life in terms of orgainisms adjusting to their environment leads to hopeless confusion. But when it is assumed that the orgainism is adjusting the environment to it, everything falls into place with great ease.

-- Quotations from L. Ron Hubbard on the matter of Evolution

Err... Yeah, and if we all shut our eyes tight and click our heels together at the same time, we'll all meet in Kansas. But, there's more! Here's Hubbard again:

Evolution: there's no such thing. Bodies don't evolve. They deteriorate, but they don't evolve. You can trace all kinds of reasons how they evolve, and why they evolve, and you can figure it all out, but the truth of the matter is when you get horses on a planet, somebody came along and mocked up some horses! Now, they also mocked up these horses with the capability of growing hair or not growing hair. You've got adjustment factors, but not evolution factors. So you confuse the adjustment factors and prove the whole theory of evolution. And now you know man came from mud, and you can write a book like Pavlov and get the whole world poisoned. You see how this one goes?

All of this is based on what? It's based on errors in time. Errors in time. Because an individual has this incident: It's a wrong time, wrong place, going wrong the whole way, and it took up two hours and actually looks like it takes up seven million, see? There are such incidents.

The boy done lost his shit.

Much of that is quoted here, on an interesting page that traces Hubbard's evolving view of evolution and the origins of Man, and includes some of his writings on the CLAM and the SLOTH and the current state of Scientology's view of evolution. Spolier: Scientology is Fucked Up.

I guess that puts Scientology firmly in the category of things you'll want to throw in the face of any Intelligent Design advocate who thinks we need to teach children alternative ways of explaining the origins of man. "Here's an alternative. Let's teach them about the CLAMS and the BIRDS:"

"Occasionally the creatures of the beach, still shell animals, had their troubles with birds which had become so earlier [sic]. Birds of a very crude construction developed a taste for clams. Clams had no adequate defence against them. If a clam opened its shell, the bird would thrust in a beak or a claw. If the clam then closed, the bird would fly up into the air. The clam would let go, drop on a rock and become bird food. If the clam didn't close, it became bird food anyway.

Falling sensations, indecision and other troubles go with the BIRDS."
-- LRH

Avoid PriceRitePhoto, if you're buying camera equipment on-line. They apparently run a classic bait and switch operation: they advertise cameras at well below retail and if you try to buy one, they try to sell you high-priced accessories. And, if you don't bite, they'll refuse to ship the camera and threaten to sue you, or have you arrested, or charge huge 'restocking fees', or ask you to sign contracts where they'll charge your CC if you post negative reviews, etc.. And, they apparently do business under many different names. Joy.

They're Brooklyn-based, as are many other shady mail-order camera stores. Here is a big gallery of pictures of the storefronts of a bunch of Brooklyn camera stores. Many of them are just homes, or mail drops, or back rooms.

Even though they're also NYC-based, I've had very good luck with B&H and Adorama - they're not all scammers.

NC Zoo

I was wondering what Scientology's take on the whole evolution / Intelligent Design debate was. So, I Googled.

I found a hilarious overview at the Skeptic Friends Network:

Our next evolutionary stage was the CLAM, a “scalloped-lip, white-shelled creature.” We CLAMS had a host of problems, the first being the birth of our “epicentres [sic] of [what] became the human jaw.” Other than that, some of the CLAM's misadventures included not being able to close its jaws when needed. For instance, it would “get its shell stuck open and be unable to shut it.” Ouch! Also, it would be washed ashore and “bake under a frying sun,” which, by the way, causes people to have sunburns if this memory of being a CLAM is “stimulated.”

The main course of reproduction for the CLAM was using spores, which were on the lip and “permitted to grow.” These spores, you should know, could “burst” and be “sudden and painful.” (And, ignore the fact that real-life clams don't propagate this way.) These spores, however, “gave `incident' which permitted the human teeth to have a pattern.”

If you want to “stimulate” a person into remembering their life as a CLAM, you need only to ask, “Can you imagine a clam sitting on the beach, opening and closing its shell rapidly?” Then you should make a motion with your thumb and forefinger opening and closing. According to Hubbard, the person might “grip his jaws … and feel quite upset.” He or she might even say something about the “poor clam,” become depressed, and, in some cases, fall into a stupor.

Wow. But, it gets better:

Next is the WEEPER (also known as the BOOHOO), another shell animal, whose “plights are many and pathetic” — but, sad to say, yet another stage of our evolution. Its experiences are very hard to distinguish from the CLAM's. For instance, it also lay on the beach “as seaweed and a dying clam.” The WEEPER or BOOHOO also struggled to open its jaws, and when it did so to grab some food… POW — it might “get a wave in the shell” along with unwanted sand. This was an anxious period of our evolution, obviously.

The WEEPER had to breathe oxygen at some point, so it regularly pumped out salt water to inhale “atmosphere.” This is why we cry! We “pump out the salt water” to relieve ourselves; or, as Hubbard says, “…[cry] out a grief charge…”

This WEEPER had two “pumping tubes” which later “evolved” into “the eyes of a human being.” Naturally, it had some problems since it lived on the “edge on the surf” and had to furiously pump to eat or breathe.

Awesome stuff. And that was just the first Google hit ! I must learn more.

(via Jeff VanderMeer):

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don't speak often) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want - good or bad - BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE.

When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON'T ACTUALLY remember about you.