Bidding war

Seen in the news:

Asia quake death toll tops 13,000
Toll from Tsunami rises above 25,000
Quake, tsunamis kill more than 26,000
Toll From Tsunami Rises to More Than 51,000
Tsunami death toll tops 56,000
Disaster’s toll surpasses 58,000
Officials warn of disease; death toll tops 60,000
Quake, tsunami deaths top 76,000
Tsunami death toll tops 80,000
Red Cross fears tsunami toll could top 100,000

Twenty, twenty, who’ll give me twenty? Thank you, sir! Twenny fi’, twenny fi’, yes, and thirty, thirty thousand corpses, the gentleman in the back. Can I see forty, forty, forty?

Makes you just wanna’ say, “Phuket!” But I suppose the regional governments already said that years ago by declining to implement an Indian Ocean tsunami warning network.

Memories of Reggie

Following the unfortunate and untimely death of NFL star Reggie White, I decree that now is a great time for Packer fans to recall their favorite Reggie White moments. I will cite two:

(1) Week 6, 1993, nationally televised Sunday night game at Lambeau versus the visiting Broncos. John Elway is engineering a comeback in the final minute of the game. Reggie White sacks Elway on consecutive plays, third and fourth down, to seal the Packer victory 30-27. Impressive.

(2) Packers vs. Vikings, 1995. Warren Moon rolls right to pass, inexplicably delegating receiver Cris Carter to block Reggie White. In an amazing display of power, White throws Cris Carter about five yards backwards. The receiver hits and bounces at Warren Moon's feet! Moon had to actually hop back a half-yard to keep from getting tripped up by his teammate being thrown at him. Reggie then charged Moon to finish off the broken play.

Elephants gone wild!

A story picked up by many websites:

Wild elephants in Thailand stumbled upon a feast when they found a tapioca delivery truck with a flat tyre.

The driver, Somkuan Sirisat, said he had gone for help to repair the tyre last night – and when he returned, he found five or six elephants surrounding his truck and devouring its contents.

"Five or six?" Is it that hard to get an accurate count of elephants? It's not like you have to squint or anything.

"I was too afraid to go toward the truck," Somkuan told television station ITV.

Maybe if he could have been assured there were only five elephants, Sirisat would've gone in. Because when there's a sixth, they can flank you!

Army rangers were sent to the scene, said one of their officers.

A policeman and the ranger said the elephants found their windfall in the Ta Takiab district of Chachoengsao province, 56 miles east of Bangkok.

ITV showed the elephants milling around the truck, one of them holding in its trunk a tarpaulin it had apparently removed from the truck.

See, in the "Elephants Gone Wild" videos, unlike other video series, the subjects remove the tops of vehicles instead of their own tops.

The elephants left the scene after eating their fill.

The footage showed signs in the area warning drivers to "beware of wild elephants foraging on the road at night".

Yet another reason to be proud of being an American, my friends. In this country we've practically eliminated elephant muggings. Granted, we've done it by rounding all the elephants up into internment camps (i.e. zoos), but desperate times call for desperate measures. I mean, Think Of The Children.

Spamming me

And now, a survey of the From: lines arrived in recent email. Remember, the spammers use these totally realistic, entirely plausible names to get past spam filters and your discriminating eye. Would you be able to tell these are in fact spam and not, say, one of your friends or relatives?

baxie fabien
birma Boucher
Hilario Watson
Howard Bruno
Benita Bruno
blare burtie
Isabel Wxc
Carol Lskydu
Penelope Yrdcywa
Lambert Vnzakel
Marjory Teciew
Rosamond Xoicli
Katinka Hacker
Lekisha Oscar
Idonea Roscoe
Burl Farr
Gertrude Geem
Gertrud Wuesthoff
Brain Rocha
Orval Alfaro
Pierette
Erikim
Ava S. Collocation
Registrar H. Restless
Magnetosphere G. Ungovernable

Telephone game

A scare-email was forwarded to me today. It's funny because often these scare-emails mimic the game of "Telephone" in that the message keeps mutating as it travels, and in this particular case the message itself is about telephones! The forwarded email reads, in part:

Starting Jan. 1, 2005, all cell phone numbers will be made public to telemarketing firms. So this means as of Jan. 1, your cell phone may start ringing off the hook with telemarketers, but unlike your home phone, most of you pay for your incoming calls. These telemarketers will eat up your free minutes and end up costing you money in the long run. According to the National Do Not Call List, you have until Dec. 15th, 2004 to get on the national "Do not call list" for cell phones.

The message forwarder himself writes, by way of introduction:

I received the following imbedded e-mail which covers the fact that on Dec 15th telemarketers can start calling your cell phones.

This makes me chuckle. First, the scare-email, which contains no actual evidence or references of any kind to support its claims, is referred to as covering "fact." Second, the date for the onslaught of the telemarketing scourge has been bumped up to December 15th. And did you get that part about how the telemarketers will "end up costing you money in the long run"? What - do they sometimes make you money in the short run?

All this is not to say there isn't legitimate concern about erosion of cell subscribers' privacy. There exists a consortium of cell companies that want to put together a database; a "Wireless 411." The claimed motives are pure but cell users don't trust the companies. I don't blame them. For anyone who wants the skinny on this and possible implications, which are considerably more complicated than anything the chain emails dream up, I would suggest reading:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.asp

If you're still uneasy after reading that, you can always put your cell number (or any other phone number) on the national do-not-call registry. Notice that it's still just one registry - not a separate list for cell phones as the scare-email hilariously alleges - and there's no absolute final due date for registering. I find it easiest to register over the internet, at

http://www.donotcall.gov

Recurring dream

The dream is a once or twice a year thing. It's never exactly the same, but the theme is: It's late in the semester, and I've barely done any of the work in the course. In fact, I can hardly remember attending any of the classes. Is there a project due as well? Then I wonder if I'm already past the drop date for pulling out of the course entirely. It's one of those dreams that induces an anxiety that will sneak up on me at odd times during my waking hours the rest of the day. I think it's the only one, really.

I suppose that since I have spent a majority of my life to date in school, it shouldn't be too shocking that this dream still pops up from time to time. But recently a coworker of mine said he had this dream again, and this guy is easily in his fifties (with a daughter in college to boot). This strongly implies that I'm going to be having this kind of dream throughout my working life. What bemuses my coworker is that "it's not like college was particularly traumatic or anything!" Agreed. So why the residual anxiety?

Contrast this with an anxiety dream that has vanished: the "I'm in public in my underwear" dream. I reckon that the frequency of this dream correlates to when a person is growing, changing, and thereby anxious about his physical self. Eventually, most people (I think) grow comfortable and confident with that aspect of themselves and the dream is purged. So there is definitely an age aspect to it.

This concept was best encapsulated during a conversation some years back, when my Grandpa Clyde was still alive. He was talking about how when he was a young man he and his friends would skinny dip out at the lake. This amazed and alarmed my younger, pre-teen cousin Matthew, who asked, "You didn't have any clothes on?"

"That's right," Clyde affirmed.

Matt, still incredulous that Grandpa didn't understand the grave risk he had taken, asked "But what if some girls came by and saw you?"

Clyde quipped, "Well then they got a treat!"

Bad science again

According to the New York Post, Fox is planning a TV series called "Darkside," to be set on the far side of the earth's moon:

Plans are under way at Fox — which wants to make a "Lost" of its own — for a new series about a group of of astronauts who go missing after tracing a distress signal to the dark side of the moon.

When they arrive on the other side of moon — which is cloaked in perpetual darkness and beyond radio contact with earth — they discover a mysterious compound.

Now, I realize that this bit was in the New York Post's entertainment section - so I'm just going to poke at it rather than get all indignant - but where did anybody ever get the idea that there's a side of the moon "cloaked in perpetual darkness?" And is the Post staff writer endorsing this notion, or is he just repeating the gobbledygook fed to him by Fox's silly concept people?

The real, astronomical situation is not hard to understand. The same hemisphere of the moon is always facing the earth, okay? That much is obvious from simply looking at the moon from time to time. So there is a "near side" and a "far side." When the moon is full, the near side is fully illuminated. Again, obvious. Why is it not equally obvious that when the moon is "new" that it is the far side that is fully illuminated?

I am envisioning coaching a room full of scriptwriters, each holding a softball in outstretched arm in the direction of a bright lamp. After three hours, when the concept starts sinking in, they shuffle to the next room to test whether bowling balls fall to the floor faster than baseballs, etc.

Sorry, that started sounding indignant toward the end there. That could be aftereffects from years of growing up with well-meaning adults asking, "So how long have you been interested in astrology?"