Local Seattle supermarket chain Metropolitan Market used to be known in these parts as Thriftway. A makeover or a takeover in the past few years brought a new name… and a new logo.
Is that a mutant ‘m’ there? Might not be the best symbol for a grocer in these days of genetically-modified foods. When I look at the logo I see Blinky, the three-eyed fish of Simpsons fame.
I just got a call from a telemarketer:
ME: Would you please remove my name from your call list?
HIM: Sure, if I can just save you some money, though…
ME: Please just remove my name.
HIM: Sure, but have you ever been open-minded?
ME: surprised laugh
HIM: See, it’s funny, huh? Let me just…
ME: click
And then I had a disturbing thought. I’ve been getting a lot more unsolicited sales calls recently. And I didn’t sign up for the national “do-not-call” list. If all those millions of people who did sign up are off limits, who are the telemarketers going to call? I’m guessing those of us who didn’t sign up are going to be getting a lot more calls.
Bush ‘not paying attention’ to Democratic race
Associated Press
Bush said he insulates himself from the “opinions” that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories. “I appreciate people’s opinions, but I’m more interested in news,” the president said. “And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”
Found on Kottke
A report by a group of computer security experts warns of the dangers of monoculture in the computer world:
Want PC Security? Diversify
By Joanna Glasner, Wired News
Will Rodger, CCIA’s director of public policy, said concerns regarding Microsoft’s monopoly prowess, and the analogies to farming, are nothing new among members. But worries are intensifying.
Rodger likens today’s situation, in which Windows dominates the vast majority of desktops, to conditions faced by farmers during the Irish potato famine and by American cotton growers devastated by the boll weevil. In both cases, he said, farmers were ravaged by a blight that would have been far less severe had they had a greater variety of strains in cultivation.
I’ve been thinking in recent weeks about how former President Clinton developed a reputation as a liar. And how President Bush has taken lying to a whole new level, and yet maintains a reputation as an honest, “straight-shooter.” (There’s likely a puritanical ethic mixed up in there somewhere.)
The Bush White House is clever at lying, but a bigger problem seems to be two-fold. First, for the most part, the press in this country plays the role of lap-dog. Second, the American people apparently really, really want to believe that Bush is an honest, decent President, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Whether or not the President will be able to continue tossing out outrageous whoppers is not clear. Despite what the President says, things are not getting any better either in this country or in those parts of the world the U.S. now occupies.
To help catalog the divide between reality and Bush-speak, the folks at MoveOn.org have started Misleader.org: A daily chronicle of Bush Administration distortion.
Misleader.org will provide an accurate daily chronicle for journalists of mis-representations, distortions and downright misleading statements by President Bush and the Bush Administration.
The site just started, so it’s a little light on content now. I figure they could build a pretty impressive archive section if they set their minds to it.
I’ve finally gotten around to posting some photos from a camping trip I took with friends several weeks ago.
Cranky contrarian Christopher Hitchens takes a refreshing — if somewhat scattered — whack at the Ten Commandments.
The Commandments and immorality
msnbc.com
It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries?
There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.
While looking through some old photos, my father came across this one of my grandfather on Mt. Fuji. The caption on the back of the photo — in my grandmother’s handwriting — reads: “Paul V. Gerhard on the summit of Fuji San Jan. 1, 1934.” I’m not sure of the accuracy of that date, since in her memoirs my grandmother mentions that my grandfather climbed Fuji “with two friends on December 31, 1935.”
The weather on the mountain in this photo looks beautiful, though cold, of course. I could’ve used a jacket with that kind of hood on my hike last fall.
I’ve added this photo to my Four Generations On Fuji-San entry.
When I was up in Alaska last week, my father showed me an old calendar that must have belonged to my great-grandparents. The calendar is a collection of prints by the Japanese artist, Hokusai. It’s from 1910, the year of my grandmother’s birth, and it has her birth date circled in August.
What better way for the American government to mark the 58th anniversary this week of the bombing of Hiroshima than to hold a secret meeting to plan for expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
To paraphrase the always-colorful, ever-diplomatic North Korean Foreign Ministry:
“We know that there are arrogant bastards within the present U.S. administration but have not yet found out such rude human scum as those who would so insensitively dismiss victims of U.S. weapons of mass destruction. This meeting is no more than rubbish which can be let loose only by beastly men bereft of reason.”