Some funnies

1. The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class because it was a weapon of math disruption.

5. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

6. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

7. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

8. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

9. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to The other, 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'

10. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

11. A small boy swallowed some coins and was taken to a hospital. When His grandmother telephoned to ask how he was, a nurse said, 'No change yet.'

12. The short fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large

13. A backward poet writes inverse.

14. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

15. Don't join dangerous cults: Practice safe sects!

Courage as described by Lance Armstrong

Things take place, there is a confluence of events and circumstances, and we can’t always know their purpose or even if there is one. But we can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave. We each cope differently with the specter of our deaths. Some people deny it. Some numb themselves with drugs or alcohol. We are tempted to do a little of each of those things. But I think we’re supposed to try to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage.

The definition of courage is: the quality of spirit that enables one to encounter danger with firmness and without fear.

Lance Armstrong . . . It’s Not About the Bike

Video - Bell, Book and Candle -

Another clip from the same film but this time with Jimmy Stewart and Ernie Kovacs . . .

Video - Bell, Book and Candle - Ernie Kovacs

Ernie Kovacs and Jack Lemmon . . . .

Legalizing Marijuana

Once again I heard another talk show host have a 3 hours debate over the legalization of marijuana. It's so ridiculous a topic because the discussion always focuses on leaf product of marijuana. I've never heard one of these discussions mention the real alternative which is Marinol, a legally produced available form of THC, the chemical that gives you the high. Make Marinol available to people who claim that only marijuana (THC) can help them with their medical condition and let's stop this debate about legalizing the leaf marijuana click here for more info on Marinol.

Over 60? Don't worry about Swine Flu

According to the Center for Disease Control - no one over 60 years of age has contracted swinw flu, they don't know but hey, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Confusing this with that

Too many people confuse knowledge with wealth. Just because someone is wealthy doesn't mean they are smart.

Fame

Fame should never be confused with accomplishment.

My new mandolin is ready

Tomorrow I get my new mandolin made by Craig Wilson, it's a beauty. You can see at Mandolin Cafe click here

The Scientific Method

One of the greatest legacies of the European Enlightenment is a scientific methodology that allows us to make increasingly accurate observations about the world around us. This methodology is based on the assumption that all we need in order to comprehend nature is a solid understand of the laws and processes that we can observe and test in the natural world. The supernatural does not enter the equation, because it does not rovide us with any explanations that can be test empirically.

This morning at 4:05:06

You probably weren't up when this happened but at 5 minutes and 6 seconds after 4 A.M. the time was: 04:05:06 07-08-09

THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN UNTIL THE YEAR 3009!!

The Southern Cross - The Constellation Crux

Because it is not visible from most latitudes in the Northern hemisphere, Crux is a modern constellation and has no Greek or Roman myths associated with it. Crux was used by explorers of the southern hemisphere to point south since, unlike the north celestial pole, the south celestial pole is not marked by any bright star.

Dolphins

from "Two Years Before the Mast" by Richard Henry Dana . . . . 'there is nothing more beautiful than the dolphin when swimming a few feet below the surface, on a bright day. It is the most elegantly formed and also the quickest fish in salt water; and the rays of the sun striking upon it, in its rapid and changing motions, reflected from the water, made it look like a stray beam from a a rainbow.'

photo taken on a return trip from the Channel Islands

Shibboleth

I see this word a lot so I'm guessing that you all do too. What does it mean?

Shibboleth is any distinguishing practice which is indicative of one's social or regional origin. It usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group.

Psuedohistory and hyperdiffusion

A hyper-diffusionist theory is one that proposes that the greatest cultural achievements of one ancient civilization can be traced to another, higher civilization whose ideas were transmitted as a result of voyages or other forms of "diffusion" not recognized by mainstream scholars (usually because they never happened). . . . . . . This is a medieval way of thinking. Belief in hidden correspondences was almost universal before the Enlightenment, and it went hand in hand with a pre-modern methodology: first you decide what you believe, then you find the evidence, brushing aside anything that doesn't fit. from Damian Thompson's "Counterknowledge"

Don't cry . . .

Don't cry because it's over; smile because it happened.

The importance of sound in a movie

The movie "Deer Hunter" took six months to shoot, and a further five months to mix the soundtrack. Since this was his first Dolby film, Michael Cimino was eager to exploit the technology to its fullest potential. A short battle sequence, for example, (200 feet of film) took five days to dub. For the re-creation of the American evacuation of Saigon, he accompanied composer Stanley Myers to the location and had him listen to the sounds of vehicles, tanks, and jeep horns as the sequence was being filmed. Myers then composed music for the sequence in the same key as the horns, so that it would blend with the images creating one truly bleak experience.

Truly Happy

A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

How a tree is helping to cure AIDS

In September of 1987, Dr. John Burley, research botanist at the Arnold Arboretum, was exploring the tropical rain forests of northern Borneo, searching for new medicines from plants to fight cancer and AIDS. As he collected a sample of an unknown tree species for testing in the laboratories of the National Cancer Institute, he also created a herbarium specimen for the Arnold Arboretum. Four years later an extract from the sample was found to be effective in preventing the growth of the AIDS virus. When researchers returned to Borneo to collect more plant material, the forest had been cut down and the plant was gone.
Dr. Peter Stevens, a botanist at the Arnold Arboretum, studied the herbarium sheet and identified the specimen as the rare species Calophyllum lanigerum. With this identification, botanists have been able to locate trees of the same species growing in a botanical garden in Singapore. In 1993, scientists isolated the compound calanolide A, which inhibits the growth of AIDS virus and has now been synthesized in the laboratory. Consequently, calanolide A is in the preclinical drug development as a promising vaccine to prevent the spread of AIDS.

Your Computer according to Dr. Seuss

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol, that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall.

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse; then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'cuz sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang.

When the copy on your floppy's getting sloppy in the disk, and the macro code instructions is causing unnecessary risk, then you'll have to flash the memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM, and then quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!

Well, that certainly clears things up for me. How about you?