Monthly Archives: April 2012

Start your iPods

Random five - Genius edition
1. T-Rex - Jeepster
2. Velvet Underground - Pale blue eyes
3. Bowie - Kooks
4. Modern Lovers - Roadrunner
5. Gang of Four - Damaged Goods

Your turn!

Things Ain't What They Used To Be

Simon Doonan looks around, adopts "an expression of extreme gravitas", and concludes that we've become stupid and shallow and that everything was awesome, way back when. How does he know this? Well, if you make a list of the people that smart people think about when they think about the middle of the last century, it's startlingly light on vapid pseudo-celebrities; smart people were famous back then! A golden age, for sure. But look at today: Kim Kardashian! She is famous ... for being famous. A trivial nothing of a person has captured our attention! Moral decay!

Why, back then...

Even if you loathed opera, you knew and respected Maria Callas and her commitment to her art...

Popular singer was popular for singing. Was she popular for anything else?

...to mention nothing of her commitment to dramatic black eyeliner and swallowing a tapeworm to get thin, allegedly.

Mmm. Gravitas.

Why have we shoved all today’s accomplished people onto the back burner? Yes, we have Adele, but I am looking beyond the popular-music realm to the broad areas of accomplishment alluded to above and asking where, fer chrissakes, are the glamorous neurophysicists? Where are the charismatic, overachieving innovators and inventors? Steve Jobs? A unicorn! A lone example. You are going to have to do better than that if you wish to upend my hypothesis.

Okie dokie...

  • Bill Gates
  • Stephen Hawking
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Richard Branson
  • James Cameron
  • Mark Zuckerberg
  • Elon Musk
  • Jimmy Wales

Slackers. Slacking in obscurity. Nobody knows who they are.

If only we were as smart and serious-minded as those upstanding citizens of yore, those fine chin-strokers who didn't know anything about gossip, tabloids, sensationalism, shallow reporting or celebrity culture.

If only we were that smart.

Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight

Update: A hoax?!? Come on world, entertain me!

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives - for up to six hours after their death.

The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament.

It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.

The 'farewell intercourse' law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament

Hmm.

Egypt's National Council for Women is campaigning against the changes, saying that 'marginalising and undermining the status of women would negatively affect the country's human development'.

Hmm... IMO, the real issue is that it's disgusting. Besides...

The subject of a husband having sex with his dead wife arose in May 2011 when Moroccan cleric Zamzami Abdul Bari said marriage remains valid even after death.

He also said that women have the right to have sex with her dead husband, alarabiya.net reported.

See, equality! If you want it.

Mail Online

Project: House

Since Rob asked...

Last time I mentioned the house, everything seemed like it should start, but nothing had started. That was frustrating to impatient me. Well, it turned out there were a couple of things standing in the way:

  1. A bunch of trees.
  2. A distinct lack of available dollars to pay for the workers who will do the actual work.

The tree situation got taken care of thanks to a bulldozer, a front end loader and a dump truck. Three weekends ago, when we went out to look at the land, they had just started to clear trees to make room for the house. Our instructions were "put the house here, the driveway here, and otherwise leave all the trees you can"; but seeing what that actually meant in practice was interesting. The absence of big groups of trees somehow made the lot change shape; it seemed to get a little smaller - it was easier to see all the property line flags hanging from the trees now. There was a giant pile of brush and downed trees off to the side, and a couple of clearings were starting to take shape. We went out this weekend and the pile was gone, the clearings have been cleared. And thanks to the rain, everything was ankle-deep with the red clay mud of central NC. Mmmm... goopy.

The issue with the dollars is still in progress, though it sounds like it's just a matter of waiting for paperwork to complete its journey back from the magical Land of Loans. Building a house requires that you pay a bunch of workers to build it, oddly enough. And paying them means you essentially need a secure line of credit that the builder can draw on, to pay for what needs to get done when it needs to get done. You don't write a big check up front; you get a bank to agree to make the full amount of the builder's estimate available and the builder just dribbles it out as needed. And that means, while it's under construction, you only pay interest and principal to the lender on the money the builder has taken out, instead of on the full amount you're approved for - which is a bit of a relief (we'd like to avoid the full brunt of paying two full mortgages for as long as possible!). Once it's all done, the loan magically transforms from a construction loan into a traditional mortgage for the value of whatever the builder took out. We dragged our feet a bit on getting the loan process started though - not knowing anything about the house building process - and I suspect this delayed everything by a week or so.

So, the obstructing trees are cleared. Permits are secured. They'll be starting the foundation, the well, the septic system, etc. as soon as the loan is approved.