Near-Universally Applicable

"But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking."

Herman Hesse

Happy Europe Day!

And only a week late! A new personal record!



Speanking of which, an interesting graphic here: The European continent with only the member states--and perennial candidate Turkey--shown. (Ah, Turkey. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride; after every acession round she runs back to Asia Minor to cry in her pillow, gorge on bonbons, and repress Kurds. Truly the Bridget Jones of nations.)

Ahem. but anyway. The interesting thing here is the weird effect produced by excising portions of the landmass from the map. Take a close look; there's a funny hole in the Bay of Finland where Kaliningrad has been deleted, Scandinavia looks badly eroded, Norway having washed clear into the Polar Sea; and the Balkans are nothing but a gaping void.

Another interesting note; you don't tend to realize exactly how far east Cyprus really is. If Armenia and Georgia are shafted for membership on the basis of geography, it will ring exceedingly hollow.

You're The Only One, Baby

According to this fun little dealie, "Unique" was the 973rd most popular name for girls during the 90's.

Now, on the one hand, a rank of 973 does make it a fairly unique name; but on the other hand, uniqueness is an atomic quality; "a little bit unique" is like "a little bit pregnant," or "dead," or "Swedish."

I smell a raft of truth-in-labeling lawsuits aroud the time these girls' college loans come due.

The Colors, Dude... The Colors...

I have discovered an interesting fact today; you can crash your computer by simply attempting to playback an uncorrupted .avi file--a format theoretically supported by my player, the latest version of MPC, and one for which I just downloaded a fresh batch of up-to-date codecs a month or two ago. WTF?

On the upside, the crash was sort of pretty. After thirty secods of darkness, I got an error message, then things came back; in sixteen-color mode. It was like 1992 all over again, except that Kurt Cobain was dead and a stupider scion of the Bush family was in power. I tried playing a different video file; the result was something between looking into an infrared scope and a LSD trip. Groovy.

The .avi file in question was the first episode of Ju-Oh-Sei, which I only downloaded because the plot bore a distinct similarity to the first Cordwainer Smith story I ever read. I suspect the resemblance will not withstand further exposure, but after this I am actually somewhat more determined to see the damn thing.

They Must Have Had Really Good Contractors

From Pharyngula:

He neatly dismisses the [young earth creationist] idea that the speed of light has been changing by pointing out that E=mc²; so "a small change in the speed of light can have a disproportionately large effect on the amount of energy produced from radioactive decay," and that compressing 13.7 billion years into 6000 would mean so much energy would be released that the earth would be vaporized.

Hehm. Snort. Hee hee hee. This reminds me of a sub-chapter in Pennock's "Tower of Babel," in which the author introduces an elaborate biblical timeline, then crunches the numbers for the total population of the entire Earth around the time of the building of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, only to arrive at ~ 150, plus or minus the odd dozen.

Heheheehehe.

May I See Your Visa, Please?

I'm sorry, but I won't link to Michelle Malkin. I have some standards. However, this bears wider exposure:

I understand the Rangers wanted to do something innocuous to recognize a holiday celebrating historical and cultural pride. But the politically correct selectivity here is telling. While it's considered a celebration of "diversity" to acknowledge the military sacrifices of another nation's heroes, it's considered racist to acknowledge the military sacrifices of one's own.

Case in point: Can you imagine if someone proposed changing the Rangers' jerseys to "Confederate Rangers" to celebrate Confederate Heroes' Day?

Would you be so kind as to draw your attention to one particular sentence out of the preceding sewage leak?

...it's considered racist to acknowledge the military sacrifices of one's own.

One's own. Apparently Ms. Malkin considers the Confederate Rangers to be her nation's heroes. Now, I may have dual citizenship, but I have also pledged my fealty to the United States of America. Ms. Malkin's loyalties apparently lie elsewhere.

This sort of little Freudian slip echoes nothing so much as Julian Bond's remark of a few years ago that the administration's high officials posessed a "devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection." For media hacks, we're apparently talking remora- or lamprey-like.

Oh, and I'm sure I'll be labeled a racist for pointing out the double standard.

Well, I was going to start with "traitor" and work my way up from there. But I would likely have gotten to "racist," sooner or later.

Speaking of...

...the Economist, isn't it a tad declasse to declare yourself an "authoritative" publication in your own search-engine precis? "Widely considered athoritative," maybe. Then again, a certain smug vanity is the institutional character defect of choice over there...

Surreal Sentence of the Week II

A post on naughty advertising at Carniola lead me quite coincidentally to Wikipedia's article on Urotsukidoji, where I stumbled across this gem:

There is a theory among some anime fans, possibly first espoused by The Erotic Anime Guide, that the series is an elaborate cautionary tale about teenage pregnancy.

You. Don't. Say.

Twelve installments of unspeakable violence, around-the-clock demon hanky-panky (much of it nonconsensual), the birth and death of inuhuman gods, entire dimensions rent in twain, human heads on poles, unholy Nazi experiments, and enough experimental fornication to make the ouvres of Nin and DeSade seem downright monastic--and this is what it all boils down to? A cautionary tale about teenage pregnancy?

Damn.

Now that's what I call a PSA.

Actually, the granddaddy of the Tentacle-Rape genre might well shock those of gentler disposition clear into a life of permanent celibacy. All it succeeded in doing for me, when I saw the first OVA, my only chunk of Urotsukidoji thus far (during lunch in a science classroom in my junior year of high school. I rather suspect the guy who ran the Anime club told the bio teacher he was screening something else) was a certain detached admiration for the rather involved and complex plot, an unexpected quality in what was essentially an ultraviolent porno, and something of a contrast to the dogmatically structuralist school ("Hello, I'm the poolboy") of domestic smut on late-night Showtime.

But anyway, all this puts me in mind of yet another of my favorite-sentences-ever--unfortunately not online--from the print edition of the Anime Encyclopedia: the entry for a completely unrelated series begins with

"Such-and-such is set in Japan's second city, Osaka, which we last saw covered in a sea of tentacles in spooge in Urotsukidoji."

Hmm. This is certainly a very perverted day here at Fretful Realm. I promise I'll write something about nuns and puppies next week.