Most Politically Correct LOLcat. Evah.

Sam, from, like, the
Most Important Blog:
Pax Americana

"This isn't about fixing the women."

It's true. Men are assertive go-getters, women are pushy bitches.

Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".

We've been telling y'all this for years now. Get it through your thick skulls.

Hipparchia's cat

The original Hipparchia is famous for having sex on her front porch. Or maybe it was somebody else's front porch. I couldn't say for sure, I wasn't there.

What I can tell you is that if you're going to try this at home on your own front porch, either you'll want sturdier furniture [that's not my lawn chair, but it sure could have been], or you'll want to be the one on top.

Given this heritage to live up to, it shouldn't be a surprise when I tell you that almost exactly two months ago, just days before luring all the porch cats into the house, I came home one afternoon to find mom cat entertaining gentleman callers on the front porch.

I started a post about it, but decided to wait and see what developed before reporting on the event. I mean, breast-feeding is supposed to be an effective form of birth control, right? The kittens you've been reading about were still heartily bellying up to the milk bar every day at the time. It should have worked.

Well, if you were paying attention in biology class you know what developed. More kittens. Born just about 48 hours ago. At least four of them, maybe five, but I can't tell for sure. They're under the bed, surrounded by the dog's blanket. It's unclear whether mom cat dragged the blanket under the bed, or the dog, self-appointed kitten guardian that he is, donated it and pushed it under there. Both are equally likely.

It's not true that one cat will produce 400,000 420,000 kittens in her lifetime, or whatever the scare tactics number is that feral-cat haters use, but this one sure seems to be trying to. Sigh. I seem to be harboring an unabashed patriarchy enabler.

Those Fantastique French & Their Flying Machines

In my previous post, I got interested in that fighter jet's location, but didn't get very far on its raison d'être.

But a Francophonic friend generously donated a few minutes to co-googling, in which we discovered that the Université de Paris X Nanterre has sites at Ville d'Avray and Saint-Cloud, and the IUT de Ville d'Avray, 1 chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d'Avray, France) has an Aeronautiques program and publishes research of the applied physics variety. Call me fanciful, but I'm thinking that aeronautiques = aeronautics. Seems like a reasonable spot for a fighter jet to come to rest.



A couple of Google-y side trips along the way:

• Nicolas Sarkozy attended the University of Paris X Nanterre.


• If you tire of Google maps for some reason, there's always mappy.com. Am I the only person who thinks of Austin Powers when confronted with MappyMe?


• I like the computer-geek-y job that I have now and I work with a congenial group of of folks, but I'd love to join any of the women doing robotics.

I almost hate to do this.

I was only skimming down this list of interesting stuff but I just had to check out Why is a fighter jet parked (Google Earth coordinates 48.825183,2.1985795) in what looks to be a residential neighborhood lot near Paris?

First things first, plug those coordinates into Google Maps, turn on the satellite view, and zoom way in. Yep, there it is.


Hmmm... Certainly looks like it could be a fighter jet, but maybe it's just a mockup of some kind for some reason. Googling fighter jet france leads to a list of what else? Fighter jets developed or used by France. Checking out the links... looks like a Mirage III. More on the Mirage III here.

Zooming in as far as possible, you can just see, down in the lower left corner, that the object of interest appears to be about the same size as that scale bar that says 50 ft, so maybe it's for real.


Panning around from those coordinates in satellite view, you can see that the surrounding neighborhood does look sort of residential, but right here things look a tad industrial to my eye. And those lanes painted diagonally across the parking lot? Doesn't look very residential to me. Wassup widdat?

Well, the Paris Air Show is kind of a big deal, something to do with that maybe? Doesn't seem real likely, given that Le Bourget, site of the Paris Air Show, is 26 km down the road:


Turn on the hybrid view, pan around a bit, and look for some street names.


Googling Chemin Desvallières brings up a list of links:

• Theoretical and numerical study of strain localization under high ...


• Dissociating the effect of different disturbances on the band gap ...


• Optimal Location of Actuators and Sensors in Active Vibration ...


• Threshold Region Determination of ML Estimation in Known Phase ...


• Welcome to IEEE Xplore 2.0: Music and Model-Order Selection for ...


• Energy Citations Database (ECD) - - Document #20685984


• EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION OF THE DEPENDENCY OF THE NEGATIVE ...

Looks like Laboratoire de Mécanique de Paris X, 1 Chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d’Avray, France turns up in an awful lot of those links. I'm thinking that something that looks like "Laboratory of Mechanics" is suggestive, but I didn't find an actual website for a laboratory of mechanics. Google did, however, map out directions for me from 1 Chemin Desvallières, 92410 Ville d’Avray to 48.825183 N, 2.1985795 E, a distance of 50 whole meters.


Not that I've actually figured out yet why they've got a jet fighter parked in their parking lot, but the hunt's been fun so far.

New Favorite Blogs

• B2fxxx


• we make money not art

"A President is impeachable

if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."

Barbara Jordan, quoting James Madison, here.



thanks

Webbery

I was reading about the high price of free credit reports the other day, and decided to look up the text of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, since I think as highly of credit bureaus as I do of for-profit health insurance.

So, while I was composing a post in my head on the FCRA, I was also surfing some of my favorite blogs, which lead me to the EFF's FOIA Litigation: Abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs).

They've gone to some trouble to get this information, and will be putting a lot more effort into the project it looks like:

EFF received these documents as the result of a FOIA request made through our FLAG project. We ask that you please mention EFF if you use these documents in any way. We're a nonprofit organization, and our funding for this project depends on showing that our work is important and relevant. For more information about these documents or EFF's FLAG project, please contact EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann at marcia(at)eff.org.

I'm a fan of EFF, and not a fan of being spied on, so I thought I'd take a crack at some small portion of the project. I'm on page 45 [of 199] of the very first background documaent, A Review of the Frderal Bureau of Investigation's Use of National Security Letters, so I may not get around to actually contributing much.

A couple of years ago, I was reading in one of the magazines that only a geek could love about the FBI's antiquated computer system and their buggy database, and I remember thinking even I could do better than that. 45 pages into it and I'm glad they can't get their act together. I think.

via

Lions and snapping turtles and pit bulls, oh my!

Some years ago [ok, a lot], I worked my way through high school and part of college as a veterinary assistant. Mostly the job entails mopping up quantities of poop and restraining the business end [usually but not always the end armed with teeth] of whatever animal the vet is administering unpleasantness to [shots, heartworm sampling, temperature taking...].

We always rejoiced when a pit bull was brought into the clinic. Robust, agile, strong, stoic, and ridiculously friendly dogs, the main danger in treating them was that they'd slime you with kisses, even as you were cleaning and suturing small wounds.

Sure, it was an open secret that dogfighting happened and that pit bulls were the dog of choice, but the ones that people cared enough about to bring to the vet were mostly pets. The fighting dogs generally just lived or died, there were always more where that one came from, and the lucky ones were taken out in the woods shot if they weren't going to make it.

The pets were usually farm and ranch dogs: gentle enough to babysit toddlers, rough-and-tumble enough to play with older kids, authoritative enough to handle unruly livestock, and tough enough to hunt feral pigs. And with a short, smooth coat that didn't collect mud or burrs or hold in the heat, they were ideally suited to life in the South.

Plus, they come in lots of cool colors.

How did this paragon of dogdom become the devil dog du jour? [I stole that phrase from I-don't-remember-where-on-the-web.]

Blood sports have been and still are popular the world over: dogfighting, cockfighting, and baiting of all kinds of animals. Bear baiting was a popular spectacle, much enjoyed by Queen Elizabeth I, but bears were expensive to obtain and keep. Bulls were relatively plentiful and cheap though, and bull baiting could be enjoyed by rich and poor alike.

Bull baiting. Fans on bleachers, surrounding a high-walled pit, in the center of which was tethered a bull, to be set upon by dogs. Thus was born the bulldog, not really a breed so much as a type of dog, heavy and slow and tenacious. Somewhere along the line people got the idea of kicking it up a notch, and infused the agility and ferocity of the terrier breeds into their bull-baiting dogs. Thus was born the bull-and-terrier, which developed into several breeds over the years, the most infamous of which, thanks in no small part to Michael Vick, is the American Pit Bull Terrier.

In spite of their acknowledged prowess as fighting animals [when specifically raised and trained for it], many of the other myths about pit bulls are overblown or downright untrue. They attack and kill smaller dogs. Their jaws have more crushing power than Superman has superpowers [check out those snapping turtles!]. They're just plain vicious [better temperaments than Snoopy, actually].

I leave you with some further links about pit bulls:
A Popular History of the Pit Bull in America
Pit Bull Rescue Central
Understand-a-bull

Farmers pushing up daisies... and corn... and soybeans...

Sure, this was an excuse to add another lolcat to my blog, but here, have some farm bill reading:

• Dead farmers got $1.1 billion from USDA [new link]


• Mulch blog on Farm Bill 2007


• Blog for Rural America from the Center for Rural Affairs


• FarmPolicyFacts.org


• EWG's Farm Subsidy Database


• He Only Saved a Billion People [tangentially related]

CNN gets it right.

Good job on the format.
Excellent choice of viewer questions from YouTube.
Anderson Cooper for President.

Transcript of the entire thing:
Part 1
Part 2

I watched two whole hours of television in one sitting. Did you feel the earth shift on its axis?

Update:
Recap of all the videos and the candidates responses.

Jane Bryant Quinn gets it mostly right

in Yes, We Can All Be Insured. Nice to see some MSM writers for the masses telling it like it is. Finally.

One thing I'd like to see: on those waiting times that we're so much better at than everybody else, is anybody figuring in those of us, the uninsured, who are just going to have to wait forever?

That's what I thought.


Interesting article in that same issue on Express-Lane Medicine.

Some doctors are complaining that walk-in clinics at grocery stores -- I [heart] HEB -- will, among other evils, fragment health care. Ha!

And the free-marketeers are going to go batshit happy over the fact that market forces are solving a pressing problem here [they are]. What those people aren't going tell you [or themselves] is that dispensing antibiotics for sinus infections is easy, quick, and cheap, but this model isn't going to be expadable to the big stuff, cancer, heart transplants, the like, unless everyone has upfront all the dollars they'll need before they walk in. The only way to do that of course is some version of Medicare-for-All.

3 out of 4 kittens agree:

• Whataburger makes the best chicken fajitas and picante sauce.


• Hard-boiled eggs are edible, but you have to play with them first.


• Liverwurst tastes better if you smush it into the linoleum before you lick it up.

The one food all eight of us have agreed on so far: canned Bumble Bee Prime Fillet Atlantic Salmon.

An update in the battle to win over their fuzzy little hearts and minds:

Tiger kitten, ever the seeker after truth, eschews such mundane activities as trying out new canapes and prefers to reach for the stars. This is the one who interacts the least with other species, giving curmudgeon cat a wide berth, only occasionally taking a swipe at the dog's fluffy wagging tail, and running out of the room every time I get up from the computer. I did trick this one into taking some of that yummy salmon right from my hand once. Once.

Patches kitten sits off to the side and observes. And takes notes. I still can't touch this one either, except to get my fingers licked if they taste good enough, but like the two blues, this one runs expectantly to the kitchen at food time, and follows me around the place if I'm carrying a plate of something.

Blue kitten 1 is the half-cuddler, going so far as to jump up in the chair with me, so long as I keep both hands on the keyboard, or snuggling briefly when I'm lying on the sofa or the bed, but only if I'm reading a book. This one likes being brushed but bare hands are still suspect [unless they're holding food].

Blue kitten 2 has crossed over to the Dark Side and become a pest, snuggling up to me, to the dog, to curmudgeon cat, even when we want to be left alone. This one purrs non-stop, loves sitting in laps, being carried, being brushed, helping with the blogging. Which is all very funny, because blue kitten 2 is the one who wouldn't be taken alive a few short weeks ago.

All four of them still attack feet [and dirty socks and catnip toys] and all four have discovered the joys of racing across the bed at 3am [humans are so entertaining when you wake them up like that].

Also, all four of the kittens find strange humans fascinating... so long as said humans stay on the outside of the front windows. Once they come into the house, the only thing any prospective adopters ever get to see are some furry streaks leaving the room. And my neighbors are all getting a little tired of being pressed into service as kitten desensitizers, especially when I try to smear them with canned salmon.

My New Love

Average Conservative [in comments].

Today is the last day

to submit your question. Not that I expect CNN to pick any questions that the candidates [or CNN] might find bothersome, but all the same I'm going to be inviting myself over to someone's house tomorrow night to view the results [seeing as how I'm too cheap to buy my own TV].

Harry Chapin meets Ookie

stolen from WF


I wasn't planning to revisit Michael Vick this soon, but I've been a BradyFan83 fan ever since he put Randy up.

Not all the world is going to Hell in a handbasket

the time is: five forty-six pm

the temperature is: one hundred five degrees

That's what the time-and-temperature announcement told me when I called. Hellish conditions notwithstanding, we went to Gallery Night anyway. Rode the air-conditioned trolley around parts of downtown and historic districts, dropped into some favorite art galleries [not all of them air-conditioned], and then ended the evening sitting in the park, drinking wine, soaking up the breeze, watching the far-off lightning, and listening to the Pensacola Youth Steel Orchestra.

Poster Boy

**** WARNING: NSFW NSFK ****

Michael Vick, handsome dude with cute puppy, has a reserved spot in the 10th level of Hell.




nsfw = not safe for work
nsfk = not safe for kids

update: found the photo here

What a difference a Friedman unit makes

One of my New Years Resolutions for 2007 was to lobby Congress [okay, send them e-mails] about the farm bill, health care, the Mideast [just for starters]. It's not something I kept up with, but I got a few replies. Form letters to be sure, but replies nonetheless. Six months ago the good [and not so good] people of Congress didn't exactly see it my way. Now, though, they're singing a different tune.

We'll see what happens.