The thing I’m going to complain about isn’t that the KT shop gave me a note with the address for the service center, but didn’t write the name of the service center (so it was impossible to find and I went to the wrong place, because guess what? All Apple products except iPhones are serviced at one place, and iPhones are serviced at the other). It’s not that my employer, when offering an iPhone 4 to each professor on tenure track, failed to ask (though when I asked, I was told it had been cleared, of course) whether non-Koreans could …
Category: PERSONAL
Whew!
Well, I’ve been home for about 48 hours now, but it was a busy couple of days. Tuesday I had a full day of classes, well, from noon to 7pm; and today, I had an empty day but had some things to do, especially getting my ankle looked at. Oh, yes, sprinting across the Sydney airport on Monday morning, as well as the cold weather in Melbourne, resulted in a recurrence of the tendinitis in my left ankle. Which sucks. But it’s getting better, with hot packs and pills and so on. I’ve written a few posts that I’ll be …
Immortality?
The Maverick Philosopher discusses the fact that Christopher Hitchens, who is not doing so well, also has not recanted his atheism. Valicella writes: The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. “Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” But this of course …
Net Connected Ganked…
So if you’re trying to get hold of me, today’s a bad day. Sorry!
The Trickiness of Explaining Pregnancy Denial and Infanticide
UPDATE (5 Aug 2010): Hat tip to David Garnier, whose comment got gobbled up by the ether monsters, but who pointed me to the admission of the woman in the case described, who says it actually isn’t pregnancy denial. Nope, she just doesn’t like doctors. (And that’s why she committed infanticide a bunch of times? Crikey!) ORIGINAL POST: Robert Koehler twittered this article: The question is as horrifying as it is important to ask: Why are a rising number of French women killing their newborn babies? Finding the answer has become a matter of urgency following the discovery on Wednesday …
Woo! Woo! I am the Woo-rus!
The one thing that will always, always make someone less intimidating is when you realize they’ve been seduced by woo. I don’t mean, like, “The Woo of Lost” as a recent essay by Adam Roberts is titled. I mean full-on Deepak Chopra, Derrick Jensen, Shakti Gawain, Shambhala publications woo. The obvious stuff, when you realize someone is woo-sceptible. (Disclosure: I do, myself, own a couple of Shambhala books: both are related to Buddhism, one of them a present from a friend in high school — which is in some box in Canada, I think — and the other primarily about Buddhism …
An Update, Scattershot
Been raining hard occasionally, quite late at night. I’ve drawn close to the end of the first of three papers, which is pretty good considering all the crazy grading stuff I had to finalize last week, and some other stuff that came up over the weekend. I have some editing to do, I have a story on the go, I have some references to look up. I have a movie to go watch, maybe. We’ll see. But mostly? I have some serious laundry to do. And brewing of beer, but I have to find some place to crush my grains …
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi & Stephen Harper’s Unceremonious Assrape of Toronto
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com As I mentioned to some friends, my dad once let me stay up late to watch this on CBC. I have no idea why it aired so late, though I suspect we were getting shows on Toronto time — thus an hour or two later in our timezone, which was a constant annoyance. I wasn’t supposed to tell my sisters, as they had gone to bed and would be mad if they knew I was allowed to stay up… even though I was older than them. But I figure after recounting so many of Kipling’s …
Communication is So Important
A friend was bringing me up-to-date on his life, and for reasons I won’t get into, this story came to mind. Parts of it are second-hand, but I’m going to just tell it the way I’d tell it verbally, that is, without differentiating the bits that I know are true and the bits that are hearsay. And of course, because I’m doing that, I’ll leave out the real names, and take some liberties. I think the couple of people might be able to guess who I’m talking about already know the story, so it’s not like I’m ruining someone’s reputation. …
Pascal at the Horse Races…
This video, which I found at The Bronze Blog, is a very insightful and entertaining evisceration of Pascal’s wager. (Read the amusing comments section, too.)