How Not to Find Bombs

Sadly, this story is no relation to the fine Monty Python sketch, “How Not to Be Seen”. Since that’s funny, and this story isn’t, I’ll start with that.

There. And now you are in a good mood, right? Prepare for that mood to be destroyed!

According to a recent article in the New York Times, some idiots in Iraq have spent a great deal of time, money and effort on a new bomb-detecting technique: dowsing.

For those who don’t know, dowsing is what you see with people wandering about with y-shaped sticks looking for water. Dowsing’s ability to detect water is well-known to be non-existent. Turns out it’s ability to detect bombs is just as non-existent.

Also, here’s another fun thing: when dowsing doesn’t work, it’s the fault of the person who is doing it. Yep, blame the victim. From the Times article:

Proponents of the wand often argue that errors stem from the human operator, who they say must be rested, with a steady pulse and body temperature, before using the device.

I am really saddened that people would use this bullshit as a method to detect bombs. Frankly, you’re better off just flipping a coin to see if a car might or might not have a bomb inside. At least that gives you a 50% level of accuracy.

The last thing Iraq needs right now is to have bullshit like this dumped onto it. I hope that they quickly realize how stupid this is and go back to using real bomb-detecting methods that might actually, you know, work and stuff.

More Klingon Video Stuff

A couple weeks ago I posted up a weird video of Klingon propaganda. Now there’s a follow-up video to it.

A Fawlty Towers Contest

Thanks to the good folks at American Pop who have sent me a copy of Fawlty Towers: The Complete Collection Remastered for me to review! I’ll have the review up probably tomorrow or the next day. Amusingly, btw, you’ll notice the price of that newer, better version of the show is cheaper on Amazon than the regular version. Life’s gentle ironies.

In the meantime, they’re running a rather spiffy contest! It’s a look-a-like contest, to find people (or possibly things), that remind folks of things (or possibly people), from Fawlty Towers. The grand prize winner, chosen by the interesting John Cleese himself, will win a whole bag of loot, including a Fawlty Towers bathrobe. You better believe I want that!

Anyhow, as I said, I’ll have my review of it up in the next day or two. Meantime, go enter the contest!

This… Looks Horrible!

Here’s a clip for the new animated Doctor Who story “Dreamland”. It was made in 2009. I want to remind you of that before you hit “play.”

Pardon me while I go throw up.

Fat-Ass Americans and How to Fix Them

In the ongoing debate over healthcare reform, there’s one item that’s not brought up as much as it should be, and that is: Americans are a bunch of lazy, overweight, fat-asses who need to get off their everwidening backsides and exercise for fuck’s sake!

Ah, but how to get Americans to do this?

Well, any good health care program is going to offer incentives to patients and their doctors for the patient to lose weight. This is already done in some countries and should be done here.

But perhaps another concept might be to have government-run, taxpayer-funded, gymnasiums located in every town and city in the country.

And why not? A great many people join gyms right now, but they pay through the nose for them and then don’t usually go. If this idea was brought forth, people still might not go, but at least they wouldn’t be paying through the nose for a yearlong gym membership that they’d drop after two months.

Besides, once insurance reforms kick in, people would have a greater incentive to lose weight and providing free exercise facilities would remove at least one excuse (“I don’t have the money!”), that people use for not exercising.

Now I’m quite fat. I’m 5′6 and 260lbs (by contrast my best friend is about 5′10 and about 140lbs. Between us we average out to be 5′8 and 200lbs, which isn’t so bad). I don’t know if having a free gymnasium near me would be enough motivation to go exercise regularly, but put it this way: it couldn’t hurt.

Sure, putting together gyms around the country would be pricey, but maybe not as bad as all that. If all you did was just allow the public access to high-school gyms outside of school hours, that alone would help. I’d rather they be seperate facilities, though, with trainers and nutrtional consultants and the like.

Anyhow, while expensive, it’s going to be cheaper in the long run than treating heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and the like. Sounds like a reasonable trade-off to me.

Happy Halloween, Bugs Bunny!

Happy Halloween!

Today is Halloween, and to me that means… well, nothing, really. Tomorrow it means half-price bulk candy at the local CVS, but that’s about it.

Nevertheless, I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a couple Halloween related articles out there.

First, you know how you hear every year about strangers poisoning little kids who come around trick or treating? Actually, you don’t, because it never happens. Occasionally foreign objects will turn up in candy, but that’s different and some could possibly be a side-effect of a failure in the manufacturing process.

Second, Wicca. God, Wicca annoys me. To many Wiccans today is a holy day (though were I religious I think I’d believe either all days to be holy or none), and apparently something of an organizational nightmare.

I work tonight so no worries about me having to deal with kids coming around begging for candy. That kind of disapoints me because I like seeing the costumes, but I suspect I’ll deal, and save all my celebrating fun for 5 November!

Old v New

Another great video for all the Doctor Who fans out there! Interesting fact: I don’t know anyone who likes the new series better than the old.

This Is Some Kind of Genius

I don’t know what this video is for, but I likes it! Amusingly, someone in the comments section seems to feel this video is a slam on people from Turkey. Seriously!

Which brings me to my dream last night. No, I didn’t dream I was testifying before Congress in my Maidenform bra, instead I dreamed, no fooling, that I was at a conference on cultural issues for the Turkic speaking peoples of the Black Sea region. This came complete with a proud announcement by the MC that they’d for some reason helped provide money to produce an animated version of the old TV series Perfect Strangers. It also included music by various Turkic musicians and lots of appearances by the letter “y”.

It was a very, very odd dream.

N_GGERS

(it doesn’t mean what you think it does)

Through Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I found an article talking about racial diversity in major “liberal” cities, like Portaland, Denver, Austin and Seattle. The writer points out that they have substantially smaller than average numbers of black people living in them and somehow thinks this is significant. James Joyner finds this to be nonsense and some of Sullivan’s readers appear to agree.

I was born in Lacey, Washington, and spent several years of my adult life living in the University District of Seattle. The author of the original article is correct. There aren’t that many black people, as a percentage, in places like Seattle and very few in Lacey, at least when I was growing up.

But Sully’s readers are also correct. Blacks aren’t the only minority out there. When I was a kid going to elementary school in the 1970’s and 1980’s, I vividly remember getting used to names like Tran, Vinh and the like, since there were a lot of Vietnamese kids where I grew up. I learned at an early age to be accepting of people regardless of their skin color. Hell, one of my three best friends (and Dungeon Master, which also doesn’t mean what you think it does), was half Korean. I can’t say that I ever really noticed unless it was brought to my attention by things like him speaking Korean to his mother.

So I think the writer of the article is way off. Besides, I’m an elitist liberal who currently lives in Phoenix where about 41% of the population is Hispanic.

I think the writer of the original article is anxious to blame some imagined racist attitudes where, in fact, there’s nothing at work but geography.