blogging Archives - Page 18 of 22

October Rambling

Stan Lee becomes a Jeopardy! category

A sure sign of madness: I’m now participating on the Times Union Getting There blog. Here’s my introductory piece, and you’ll find more along the way.

A Graveyard Of Commerce: Albany’s walled-off waterfront offers a boat launch, some casual tourism, and raw sewage

W. enters a local school board race – in Colorado

For mixed family, old racial tensions remain a part of life

The REAL Way to Get Wall Street’s Attention:

GO to OccupyWishList.org to provide some necessary supplies to various Occupy groups.

Bad Lip Reading – I enjoy this more in concept than in actuality

U.S. Skater Nailed First ‘Quadruple Lutz’. No, I don’t know what it is either, but my wife does.

25 Words You Might Not Know Are Trademarked -actually most of them I knew. But there were a few in comments that I did not.

A segment from Family Feud that came out eight months ago; never said I was ahead of the curve.

Ken Levine answers my question. He’s a TV writer of some note (Frasier, MASH).

And Then There’s………Maude.

The Dick Van Dyke Show Blogathon: In Praise Of Laura Petrie’s Capri Pants (or something like that); the article’s better than the title. And related to D.V.D., the Carl Reiner Tribute at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Obscure 1987 Sitcom Predicted Muammar Gaddafi’s Death Year.

A spider in the lampshade! And speaking of spiders, Spider-Man Swing dances, and Stan Lee becomes a Jeopardy! category.

From Jim Shooter, former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics: old Superman Syndicated Strips. Plus Spooky or Inexplicable Events – Directory Assistance. Quite moving.

Nursery Rhyme Comics: Great comic illustrators do Mother Goose

MAD guy Al Jaffee’s greatest fear

Paul McCartney Toasted John Lennon At His Wedding Reception

The Porkka Boys cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Folks from Finland are particularly fascinating to me. In any case, not a wretched excess version, such as William Shatner’s jaw-dropper.

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) announced the appointment of Dr. Anne C. Beal, M.D., M.P.H., as its first chief operating officer. PCORI was created by Congress as an independent, non-profit research organization to help patients and those who care for them make informed health decisions. Anne, BTW, is my cousin.

An interview with singer, songwriter, poet and my e-friend, Amy Barlow Liberatore

Did you know of Frank Kameny, who died this month? You will after you read these pieces by Arthur at AmeriNZ and, and watching this piece from CBS News.

Patti Page recently rerecorded “Doggie in the Window” as “Doggie in the Shelter.”

Science fiction writer David Brin shared this fascinating blog post about the social and cultural meaning of Star Trek

Never say science fiction is just make-believe. We live it every day

(Thanks to JA Fludd for some of these)

Foolishness over Our Food Supply

The results show that the dominant causes of food price increases are investor speculation and ethanol conversion.

There’s an appeal for CARE’s 2011 World Hunger Campaign going on – tax-deductible at least in the US. And I find it absurd.

Not that they are making the appeal, but that they HAVE to. How is it that there is a food crisis?

Part of it is elucidated in a study by the New England Complex Systems Institute entitled The Food Crises: A quantitative model of food prices including speculators and ethanol conversion [PDF].

From the abstract:
Recent increases in basic food prices are severely impacting vulnerable populations worldwide. Proposed causes such as shortages of grain due to adverse weather, increasing meat consumption in China and India, conversion of corn to ethanol in the US, and investor speculation on commodity markets lead to widely differing implications for policy. A lack of clarity about which factors are responsible reinforces policy inaction. Here, for the first time, we construct a dynamic model that quantitatively agrees with food prices. The results show that the dominant causes of price increases are investor speculation and ethanol conversion. Models that just treat supply and demand are not consistent with the actual price dynamics. The two sharp peaks in 2007/2008 and 2010/2011 are specifically due to investor speculation, while an underlying upward trend is due to increasing demand from ethanol conversion.

In other words, greed, and insanity.

Read also The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2010: Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises [PDF] from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization: “FAO estimates that a total of 925 million people are undernourished in 2010 compared with 1.023 billion in 2009. Most of the decrease was in Asia, with 80 million fewer hungry, but progress was also made in sub-Saharan Africa, where 12 million fewer people are going hungry. However, the number of hungry people is higher in 2010 than before the food and economic crises of 2008–09.”

There are also, increasingly, water shortages. Frankly, those TV ads such as One Million New American Jobs: The Benefits of Increased Access to Domestic Oil & Gas, touting the Canadian tar sands oil that would have been too dirty for the US government to buy, under legislation signed by George W. Bush, make me even more nervous. Allegedly cheaper oil, but at what cost to the water supply?

As Blog Action notes:
“Food is something that we all share in common but is distinct to each of our cultures. The way we produce, distribute and consume food is crucial to our shared future, and the unhealthy imbalance of food scarcity in developing world and food over-abundance in the developed world is unsustainable for us all.”

Take the quiz.

Things you didn’t know you didn’t know

Inscrutable.

I was catching up with my blog reading when I discovered that LisaF over at Peripheral Perceptions had called me out in one of her posts with this challenge. So I’m giving it a try.

If you could go back in time and relive one moment, what would it be?
I suppose winning my JEOPARDY! game. I would have breathed, instead of hyperventilating.

If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be? Just one?

There are so many. I suppose there was a friend with an illness, and I didn’t realize how significant it was, and I should have. If I had, I would have gone there to visit.

What movie/TV character do you most resemble in personality?
I have no idea. At some level, I suppose it’s one of those characters on that show the Big Bang Theory – which I don’t watch because I just can’t stand the laugh track – who knows a few things but is socially inept. I’m not as smart as those guys, but not as much of a dweeb either. Or Drew Carey on the Drew Carey Show.

If you could push one person off a cliff and get away with it, who would it be?
I honestly don’t think I could bring myself to push anyone off a cliff unless someone was trying to push me off a cliff and it was self-defense. Or I was defending someone else. Yeah, I might be able to do that.

Name one habit you want to change in yourself.
Going to that negative place. there might be five great things and one bad thing, and guess which one gets too much of my attention?

Describe yourself in one word.
Inscrutable.

Describe the person who named you in this meme in one word.
Colorful.

Why do you blog? (In one sentence)
Can it be a really LONG sentence?
I blog because I have found it useful, even necessary to write what I’m thinking and feeling, lest I interrupt my mental processing with ‘noise’; yet I’ve found it more beneficial through the interaction that has evolved with other, usually distant, people, not occasionally more meaningfully than those with people I see on a daily basis.

Now I’m suppose to pass this on and share the brain-racking insightful fun. So, I decided on YOU. You know who you are; if you think it’s you, it probably is. If you don’t, it’s probably you, too.

How Can You Miss Me If I Don’t Leave?

When one blogs every day, not blogging felt like a flashing light – maybe he’s sick. Or MAYBE he’s not home. Continuing to blog was a security measure, as much as anything.

I was away the past couple of weeks. The family essentially circumnavigated Lake Ontario. We were in Niagara Falls for 2 days, 4 days in Toronto, 2 days in Peterborough, ON for the Olin family reunion, 2 days in Canton, NY (near my wife’s alma mater, St. Lawerence University), then 4 days in the Adirondack Mountains of NYS. I was gone from Saturday, July 30 through Saturday, August 13.

Yet I posted every day, through the magic of the thingamabob that allows me to post ahead. If you did miss me, it was that it took me longer to read and comment on your posts, to approve your comments to my posts, and the like.

When one blogs every day, not blogging felt like a flashing light – maybe he’s sick. Or MAYBE he’s not home. Continuing to blog was a security measure, as much as anything.

I didn’t even have time to write anything in draft for the first week and a half, because of time, and the little writing I did manage was pretty much in draft form, as a (pretty much continuous) word documents, without pictures and the like. When I got home, spent most of my time doing things such as getting rid of 350 e-mails.

But expect low content for a few days until I get a chance to catch up.

Christmas in July, self-generated

Generally, I’m just not that acquisitive. But I admit that getting stuff in the mail gave me almost as much of a rush as seeing the actual items themselves.

There was a period in late May and early June when I was really able to crank out blog posts. The mind was really engaged. There was a point that I actually was ahead 30 posts. Which was, I suppose, a good thing. Because when it started getting hot, my blogging started to cool off. I might write 2 posts in 10 days. So I would be down to 22 posts.

Now, I suppose I should explain that they were not the next 30 days out. They were for whatever special day struck my fancy. So I have written, weeks ago, posts for September 2 and 25, November 17, for example. But not necessarily for three days hence.

I think I hit a patch of melancholia. I can usually tell because I often buy stuff. For instance, Mile High Comics had this 60% off sale, which I used to purchase some Marvel Masterworks, about $300 of books for only $120, with free shipping.

My buddy Alan was having an eBay sale, and I bid on two books, one of which I got, a bio of Krazy Kat creator George Herriman. (On the other, an autobiography of Joe Simon, someone outbid me at 1:39 pm and the bidding closed at 1:40.)

I decided to buy more music on Amazon and ordered $25 worth for free shipping. I was surprised and pleased to discover that I had some Amazon points somehow, so that the purchase, of Outkast, Neil Young, and Sam Moore (of Sam & Dave) was free.

Oh, and I received my Top Pop Singles book I had ordered a few months earlier.

Generally, I’m just not that acquisitive. But I admit that getting stuff in the mail gave me almost as much of a rush as seeing the actual items themselves. It was peculiar.

Now I’ll spend time reading/listening to these items, which I hope will tide me over until the ACTUAL Christmas.