Coffee Klatch

From the Book of Ratings, an analysis of Cold Symptoms. (For those of you unfamiliar, the Book of Ratings is an AWESOMELY funny book by Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg, who provides “opinions, grades, and assessments of everything worth thinking about.”)

Cold Symptoms
Sneezing
In minute quantities, sneezes can be gratifying. I’ve heard orgasms described as a sort of full-body sneeze, and that’s an alarmingly accurate description. I don’t go on the Internet at two in the morning looking for pictures of bee pollen, so I think I’ve still got perspective, but I figure if you’re going to be expelling mucus at fastball speeds, you may as well put it in the best possible light. B+

Stuffy Nose
When I was younger I didn’t realize that sinuses actually swell when you’re sick. I thought that the reason I couldn’t breathe out of at least one nostril was that a wad of passage-blocking snot was in the way, and it bugged the preteen hell out of me that no amount of blowing could clear it. The only good thing about a stuffy nose is that if you’re in too much misery to sleep, you can always play “waiting for the nostril switch.” D+

Coughing
The human animal has an astonishing repertoire of coughs, the sickness equivalent of a high-end synth box. My favorite, which is to say the least annoying, is a quick lung-clearing hack. The worst are those long resonant vibrating coughs that leave you feeling as if your lungs had been scrubbed by an obsessive-compulsive with a fresh scouring pad. C-

Fever
I don’t find fevers pleasant–except, of course, for disco fever–but I am grateful for them as the ultimate vindication of one’s whining, short of wasting death. Complaining about headaches and scratchy throats can be dismissed as a ploy to get attention and/or avoid work, but once that thermometer reads 98.7 or so, you’re sick, baby, with all the pillow-fluffing and daytime-television-watching due thereto. B-

Sore Throat
A vague scratching at the back of my throat is, often as not, the first sign of an oncoming attack of several days of burning misery. Because of this, I pay frequent low-level attention to my throat, the way adolescent girls pay frequent low-level attention to the growth of their breasts. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to convince yourself that you have a minor sore throat if you’ve just woken up, inhaled cold air, or eaten wasabi in the last week, so there are a lot of false alarms, and many oranges have given up their lives for my paranoia. D-

Headache
I don’t get many headaches, of which I’m glad, because if one is to believe television advertisements, most headaches are slightly more painful than extended torture by intelligent evil mandrills and are accompanied by such uncomfortable effects as blurry close-ups of you grimacing while holding a hand to your forehead. Luckily, you’ve got Epoxidril, with the maximum amount of painkiller available without immediate liver failure. D

Personal Note: Up there with the coughs, at least from an observer’s unfortunate standpoint, is OTHER people’s coughs that are continual attempts to clear the phlegm from their breathing passages. Yuck!

Current music: In the Wake of the Wind, by David Arkenstone

Here is another snippet from The Book of Ratings. This was a book I got for Christmas a year ago and blogged about shortly thereafter.

Today’s topic is a review of “Classic Video Games.”

Space Invaders
There were enough “invasion from the top of the screen” games to choke a junior high school, but Space Invaders had one thing that few others did: it got faster. As you killed off the low-res interplanetary menace, the remaining would-be conquerors, fueled by revenge and freed-up CPU cycles, would steadily increase in speed, until one last Invader would be zipping across your screen like a Yorkie on crystal meth. And if you managed to shoot him down, the whole swarm would return, but closer: Yay, paranoia! B+

Pac-Man
The real tragedy of Pac-Man, aside from a sequel addiction that made the Friday the Thirteenth movies seem restrained, was that the key to the game was not skill, reflexes, or even intelligence, but rather memorization. The video games section of Waldenbooks was filled with books that told you the exact moves to make at the exact time, making mastery of Pac-Man only faintly more impressive than memorizing the first hundred digits of pi. C-

Night Driver
Before video game makers figured out that what you really want to do is beat up on guys with names like “Goro,” they were busy turning some of the most unpleasant aspects of modern life into video games. Witness Night Driver, which was an uncanny simulation of driving a car at night when you can’t see anything. Whoo! Coming soon: Night Driver II, which adds a simulation of an overheating radiator and an eight-year-old throwing up in the backseat. D+

Donkey Kong
Frankly, I’m a little tired of everyone’s favorite digital Italian. I think it was “Mario Teaches Typing” that did it for me. But back when Mario was a bit player and video game names were routinely poorly translated from the Japanese, there was a little story of a jumping guy, a blonde, and a giant ape with an inexplicably interminable supply of barrels. This was great! The music was great! The sound effects were great! That one level (out of, like, four) with the conveyor belts and the pies was great! We were pathetic then, and we didn’t even care. A-

Tetris
If we ever meet up with an alien civilization, I’m betting they won’t have Tetris, which will work to our advantage:
“We have come to share the secrets of fusion, interstellar tachyon drives, and matter transfer. What do you have to offer us?”
“Um, ultimate Frisbee, microwave popcorn, and, um, Tetris.”
“Hmm. Tell us of this ‘Tetris.’ ”
“Here, give it a try.”
Six months later, everyone on their planet will be staying up till four in the morning mumbling, “All I need is a straight one. Just one.” And we’ll have infested the cosmos like fire ants. B

Pong
Look. Table tennis is not that interesting of a game. TV is not that interesting of a medium. I can’t imagine why combining the two was such a hit, but hey, it was the early seventies, when corduroy was king. I bought an ancient Pong game at a thrift store a while back, rushed it home, hooked it up, and within seconds I was bored. So I played “Sewer Blaster Kombat 64″ instead, which was also boring, but at least it was colorful. D+

Current music: Planet of the Apes Soundtrack, by Danny Elfman

There are different theories about what the fourth dimension is. And I don’t mean the reggae group or the pop group from the 60s, The Fifth Dimension.

I’m talking about a real, physical, fourth dimension. Okay, “real” is debatable, but I’m talking about the concept of the physical dimension. Not “time” or some such cop-out. Here’s the principle:

• 0 dimensions = a point. Just a point, with no width or height or anything.
• 1 dimension = a line. You take that point and you MOVE it through space. It creates a line with one dimension–length–but no height or thickness.
• 2 dimensions = a square or a plane. You take the line (1 dimension) and MOVE it in a second direction, creating two dimensions–length and width.
• 3 dimensions = a cube. You take the square (2 dimensions) and MOVE it in a new direction, perpendicular in 3-D space to where it was, and you get a cube. Get the sequence so far?
• 4 dimensions = what has sometimes been called a hypercube. You take that cube (3 dimensions) and MOVE it in a new direction, perpendicular in 4-D space to where it was.

For background information on this concept in the form of a relatively easy-to-read fictional story, the number one recommendation by far is Flatland. And it’s Dirt Cheap! It lists for only $1.50 on Amazon. Click the link to find out more.

It’s from this book that I got the term hypercube and the belief in a physical sequence of dimensions. The story is about A. Square, a creature in a 2-dimensional world, who is visited by A. Sphere, who tries to teach him about the existence of the third dimension (which is considered heresy in his world of Flatland). It’s basically impossible until A. Sphere takes A. Square physically OUT of his world. Just working with concepts was very difficult to “get.” For instance, “up” just meant “north” to the square and he couldn’t even see the sphere until he entered and passed through Flatland, where, from the square’s perspective, he looked first like a point, then as an increasingly larger, then smaller, circle, back to a point, and then gone.

Later in the book, A. Square visits a one-dimensional world and tries to tell them about the second dimension, but they don’t really get it either.

When people discuss this concept today, it seems that Time is considered an acceptable alternative, since we can wrap our minds around that. It IS another dimension, albeit a nonphysical one. Something sitting in 3-dimensional space passes continually through time, so that makes it another spectrum that can be measured and (at least theoretically) moved through. But it’s not physical, so it’s not acceptable to me as an option.

Here’s an interesting scenario: in Flatland, from the square’s perspective, where would the sphere be when it was hovering right above him? The square didn’t have a concept of “above” or “over,” because that meant thinking three-dimensionally. From his two-dimensional perspective, the only word to describe the sphere’s position would be IN. In the square’s mind, the sphere would somehow be INSIDE him (in fact, in the book, he could see his “insides”). Am I right? There’s no other term that would fit.

I propose, then, that the same is true in our three-dimensional world. Whether you’re a Bible-believing Christian or not, you probably believe in the existence of angels, if not demons. 69% of Americans believe in angels and 49% believe in fallen angels or demons, according to Time Magazine (27 December 1993) and http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_sat4.htm. I suggest that these creatures are four-dimensional beings. When we talk about being possessed by a demon (or possibly “filled with the Spirit”, for that matter), we refer to them being “inside us.” Demons are “cast out” and inhabit people, and even children in Sunday School, when asked where Jesus is, typically say “in my heart.” Being under the control of one of these spiritual beings has nearly always been referred to in terms of inhabitation or coexistence with us. It’s a logical step, then, to say that they are four-dimensional beings who come alongside us or even materialize in our world. From our three-dimensional perspective, where would they be if they were right next to us in the direction of the fourth physical dimension? They’d be “in” us. And if we think about our concepts of spiritual things, whether ghosts or demons or angels or whatever, we talk about them being in the same room with us, just invisible, or that kind of thing. That fits right in as well.

So there you are, my take on the fourth dimension. I’ve thought about this kind of thing since high school, when I first read Flatland. The book itself is not spiritual at all, but applying those concepts to the spiritual world seems to fit. If nothing else, go to your library or shell out a couple of dollars to get Flatland for yourself. It’s not a long read and it’s very interesting.

Current music: Another Star in the Sky, by David Arkenstone

According to Don’t Know Much About Geography: Everything You Need to Know About the World but Never Learned, by Kenneth C. Davis, most of the names of our states are taken from words from local Indian tribes. I had no idea so many had that kind of origin. Here’s a list of those states that have Indian-word-based names, along with a description of the origin.

Alaska: a corruption of a native Aleut word meaning either “great land” or “that which the sea breaks against.”

Arizona: from the Papago Indian word arizonac, meaning “little spring.” (It could also be based on the Spanish arida zona (dry land).)

Arkansas: probably from akenzea, a word from the Quapaw Sioux tribe, of unknown meaning.

Connecticut: derived from quinnehtukqut, meaning “beside the long tidal river.”

Idaho: people don’t really know what the name means, but some speculate that it comes from a Kiowa-Apache name for the Comanche Indians, possibly meaning “fish eaters” or “mountain gem.” Or maybe from the Shoshonean “ee-dah-how,” meaning “Sunup!” or “Behold the Sun Coming Down the Mountain.” Interesting…

Illinois: from an Indian tribal name inini meaning “tribe of superior men,” then adapted by the French to become Illini.

Indiana: okay, not exactly an Indian name, but it means “land of Indians.”

Iowa: an obscure word probably meaning “this is the place” or “the beautiful land.”

Kansas: from the Sioux kansa, meaning “people of the south wind.”

Kentucky: from the Iroquois ken-tah-ten, meaning “land of tomorrow.”

Massachusetts: from two Indian words meaning “great mountain place.”

Michigan: from two Indian words meaning “great lake.”

Minnesota: from the Dakota Indian word meaning “sky-tinted water.”

Mississippi: an Indian word meaning “father of the waters.”

Missouri: named for the Missouri tribe and meaning “town of the large canoes.”

Nebraska: from an Oto Indian word meaning “flat water.”

North Dakota: named for the Dakota tribe.

Ohio: from an Indian word meaning “great river.”

Oklahoma: from two Choctaw Indian words meaning “red people.”

Oregon: unsure, but possibly form the Shoshonean word oyer-un-gon, meaning “place of plenty.”

South Dakota: see North Dakota.

Tennessee: derived from a Cherokee word whose meaning is obscure.

Texas: from an Indian word meaning “friends.”

Utah: named after the Ute tribe and meaning “people of the mountains.”

Wisconsin: derived from a French corruption of an Indian word whose original meaning is lost.

Wyoming: from a Delaware Indian word meaning “mountains and valleys alternating.” (But the state of Delaware was named for Virginia’s governor (go figure!), Thomas West, who was the Baron De La Warr.)

Several other states were named after King George II, King Louis XIV, King Charles I, Queen Henrietta-wife of Charles I, who owned the French province of Mayne, Queen Elizabeth I, George Washington, and William Penn’s father. The rest are from Spanish or French words.

Except for Rhode Island, which is really interesting. Apparently the Italian explorer Verrazzano said that it was about the size of the Greek island of Rhodes. But then the Dutch settlers later called it “rode” or “red” for the color of the soil. I like the first story better.

For more information on the names and nicknames of the states, and for tons more information about the entire world, read Don’t Know Much About Geography. It’s cool!

I took the quiz twice, because there was a question I was split on. That led to totally different questions and a totally different result. Click the link at the bottom to take the quiz yourself.

Here are my two results:

You’re Compassion Fatigue!
by Susan Moeller
You used to care, but now it’s just getting too difficult. You cared about the plight of people in lands near and far, but now the media has bombarded you with images of suffering to the point that you just don’t have the energy to go on. You’ve become cold and heartless, as though you’d lived in New York City for a year or so. But you stand as a serious example to all others that they should turn off their TV sets and start caring again.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

You’re Catch-22!
by Joseph Heller
Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You could coin a phrase that replaces the word "paradox" for millions of people.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Okay, I need to share another cool technology tool that I just found out about. And no wonder, since it’s very new. They just opened on August 29 and they’ve already had over 810,000 books cataloged. Anyway, the program is called LibraryThing. A clever name for a clever technology.
LibraryThing allows you to catalog your books online. That’s cool enough for those of us who have rather large personal libraries. It allows you to search the Library of Congress and over 30 other major libraries around the world (including Amazon and its foreign language versions). Having access to all these libraries (along with the libraries listed in LibraryThing), we get more standardization of book titles and classification. (Maybe that kind of thing is only interesting to us librarians, but it IS cool!)

You can also share your list with others or keep it private if you like. They even have a “widget” that you can put in your blog to show what you’re “currently reading.” You can even rate your books from 1-5 like you do with songs on iTunes! Tags are also supported, so you can add tags to books just like you add them to pictures in Flickr or links in Del.icio.us. If you wonder what use tags would be, you can click a tag to find other books that have been given the same tag, so it helps you find new books you might not have known about.

Just for fun, you can click on the “Zeitgest” link and see list of the top 50 largest libraries in the system, the top 25 most-owned books, the top 75 authors, and lots of other lists. And of course every entry in every list is clickable!

Data can be imported and exported as you like, so you can print out a spreadsheet of your library or other versions of that list. Display is available both in list format and as a “graphical shelf,” which displays the cover images of your books. The list format for displaying your library is totally customizable with 19 different fields. One click on the column header sorts by that column. It’s VERY user friendly and very convienent. There’s even a “printable view” which only displays your content, omitting the control panel type of info on the web page.

Best of all, it’s cheap to free! You can create an account and list up to 200 books for free, and you get unlimited entry for a year for $10 or “for life” for $25! Visit http://www.librarything.com/ to check it out and get started with your own library.

Current music: A Day Without Rain, by Enya

Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy is the title of a brand-new book by Peter Schweizer. It takes a look at some of the big-name liberals in our country who hurl accusations at the conservative public leaders while being guilty of the very things they’re accusing others of.

(I guess I’m just getting tired of all the accusations that liberal politicians and liberal media continue to make against conservative leaders while harboring (and hiding) their own similar flaws, failing to practice what they preach. We all know that everyone has their faults and selfish decisions and actions, but one of our biggest problems in society in this area is people accusing others when they do the same things themselves. Sounds like Romans 2:1 - “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”)

So anyway, The Weekly Standard had this to say in review: “Peter Schweizer’s Do As I Say (Not As I Do) is an entertaining exposure of the hypocrisy among some prominent liberals. In a series of 11 profiles on leftist icons from Noam Chomsky and Al Franken to Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy, Schweizer reveals that the most vocal liberals do not practice what they preach.”

The book description on Amazon reads as follows:

Members of the liberal/left exude an air of moral certitude. They pride themselves on being committed and selfless and seem particularly confident of the purity of their motives and the evil nature of their opponents. To correct economic and social injustice, liberals support a whole litany of policies and principles: progressive taxes, affirmative action, greater regulation of corporations, raising the inheritance tax, strict environmental regulations, children’s rights, consumer rights, and more.

But do they actually live by these beliefs? Peter Schweizer decided to investigate in depth the private lives of prominent liberals. Politicians like the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, the Kennedys, and Ralph Nader; commentators Michael Moore, Al Franken, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West; entertainers or philanthropists Barbra Streisand and George Soros. Using everything from real estate records, IRS records, court depositions, and their own statements, he sought to examine whether they lived by the principles they so forcefully advocate.

What he found was a long list of contradictions. All these proponents of organized labor had developed various methods to sidestep paying union wages or avoid employing unions altogether. They were adept at avoiding taxes; invested heavily in corporations they had denounced; took advantage of foreign tax credits to use non-American labor overseas; espoused environmental causes while opposing those that might affect their own property rights; hid their investments in trusts to avoid paying estate tax; denounced oil companies but quietly owned them. The same applied to causes like affirmative action, civil liberties for accused criminals, and expanded rights for minor children.

Schweizer’s conclusion is simple: liberalism in the end forces its adherents to become hypocrites. They adopt one pose in public, but when it comes to what matters most in their own lives–their property, their privacy, and their children–they jettison their liberal principles and adopt conservative ones. Schweizer’s book thus exposes the contradiction at the core of liberalism: If these ideas don’t work for the very individuals who promote them, how can they work for the country?

Some samples of the hypocrisy:
Air America radio host Al Franken says conservatives are racist because they lack diversity and oppose affirmative action. But fewer than 1 percent of the people he has hired over the past 15 years have been African-American.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have spoken in favor of the estate tax, and in 2000 Bill vetoed a bill seeking to end it. But the Clintons have set up a contract trust that allows them to substantially reduce the amount of inheritance tax their estate will pay when they die.

Hillary, for her part, has written and spoken extensively about the right of children to make major decisions regarding their own lives, such as having an abortion without parental consent. But she barred 13-year-old daughter Chelsea from getting her ears pierced and forbade her to watch MTV or HBO.

Barbra Streisand has talked about the necessity of unions to protect a “living wage.” But she prefers to do her filming and post-production work in Canada, where she can pay less than American union wages.

Schweizer sums up his book this way:
“The reality is that liberals like to preach in moral platitudes. They like to condemn ordinary Americans and Republicans for a whole host of things - racism, lack of concern for the poor, polluting the environment, and greed. But when it comes to applying those same standards to themselves, liberals are found to be shockingly guilty of hypocrisy.

“The media and the American people need to hold them accountable.”

Summary: If you’re going to lambast people for promoting things you say are evil, you better make sure that you’re promoting them yourself as you live your daily life. Live your beliefs, don’t just talk them.

Click the picture above to read more about this book on Amazon, or even to order it for yourself.

Well, it’s finally out! ALL the Calvin & Hobbes comics ever published, all 3,160 published comic strips, from beginning to end. In one, well, THREE volumes (one box set). The ten years’ worth of Calvin & Hobbes cartoons can all be yours in this beautiful, 24-pound, three-volume box set.

It lists for $150.00, but it can be yours via Amazon.com for only $94.50!

You can read or listen to the “radio article” about this on NPR’s website.

Current music: Under a Violet Moon, by Blackmore’s Night

This is the title of a book originally written in 1855 by a Portuguese guy named Pedro Carolino. The goal was to make a Portuguese-to-English phrasebook, but the problem was twofold: he didn’t speak English and he didn’t have a Portuguese-English dictionary. What he did have was a Portuguese-French dictionary (by José da Fonseca) and a French-English dictionary. The result, English as She is Spoke (EASIS), has become one of the English language’s funniest examples of good intentions going awry. Click the picture to find out more about the book on Amazon.

Here are some examples of their “translations:”

Original: Barriga cheia, cara alegre.
Proper: A full stomach makes for a content face.
EASIS: After the paunch comes the dance.

Original: Este lago parece-me bem piscoso. Vamos pescar para nos divertirmos.
Proper: This lake looks full of fish to me. Let’s have some fun fishing.
EASIS: That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing.

Original: Já não sei como me hei-de haver com esta casta de gente.
Proper: I don’t know what to do any more with this sort of people.
EASIS: I don’t know more what I won’t with they servants.

Original: Vamos mais depressa. Nunca vi pior besta. Não quer andar, nem para diante, nem para trás.
Proper: Let’s go faster. I never saw a worse animal. It doesn’t want to go either forward or backward.
EASIS: Go us more fast never i was seen a so much bad beast; she will not nor to bring forward neither put back.

Original: A cavalo dado não se lhe olha para o dente.
Proper: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
EASIS: A horse bared don’t look him the tooth.

Current music: Midnight Groove: The Art of Smooth Jazz

Do you like to read? Maybe the classics, maybe Science Fiction or Fantasy books? Or even children’s bedtime stories? But you just don’t have the time any more? I’ve found the solution for you. It’s called Book-A-Minute! Produced by a site called RinkWorks, which also does all kinds of games, puzzles, and humor materials, the Book-A-Minute program gives you “ultra-condensed books” that take a minute or less to read.

Fans of the book may be offended, but that’s not their intention. Instead, they’ve tried to make humorous summaries of popular books. Just for the fun of it.

Example:

Get the idea? They’ve got TONS of books here. Overall, it’s a very funny site, as long as you don’t take yourself or your favorite books too seriously.

Just for kicks, here’s another:

To give you a taste of the bedtime ultra-condensed books, here’s Green Eggs And Ham:

For more of these, visit:
Book-A-Minute Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Book-A-Minute Classics
Book-A-Minute Bedtime

Enjoy! I’m off to Italian Class!