perfidy

It's probably just me, but when I see a story headline like "CBC head quits after defecation, bestiality remarks", it's like I'm at a train wreck, or, for that matter, stuck in Houston traffic near an accident - I have to at least have a look. (Except for that last bit - I'm actually one of an apparently small number of Houston drivers who can ignore any accident that's not blocking the freeway, the better to avoid, well, blocking the freeway.)

At least that story's subject can easily be inferred from the title - the head cheese at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. had a failure of editorial control, logorrhea, if you like, about a couple subjects, and got turfed for the indiscretion. Whatever works for the Canadian government, who had "lost confidence" in him.

The really difficult ones, I think are like this: "Dry as a dead dingo's donger", from the September 2, 2006 issue of The Economist.

Sadly, that one's behind the subscriber's-only part of the site, so it's not directly available to non-subscribers. (See note at end of entry, below)

My precognitive abilities fail on such a headline, starting with the fact that there are two words in the title itself that I had to look up. First, I didn't really know what a "dingo" is. I presumed it's the Australian version of a prairie rat. Until I saw that headline, I honestly didn't care. But by now, Wikipedia to the rescue, and I've looked it up. Pfft! Turns out it's just a wild dog. Next time I hear someone holler "Dingo took my baby!", I'll be somewhat more skeptical. Although, come to think of it, for a dingo to take someone's baby, it would seem necessary that a dingo be bigger than the prairie rat of my fevered imagination. So please forget that I mentioned the rat.

Second, what the hell is a "donger", I said to myself? I guessed it could have been some abstract, made-up name to play the foil in an odd humor piece, from the movie Sixteen Candles. Nahh, too simple. Other sites who've used that phrase long before September 2006 provided no further information on the matter, and, like the Economist, appear to have used it for its headline value, without informing me what, praytell, a donger actually was. Same deal with another site, talking about the return of American Idol, back in 2005. But the only reason for the use of the phrase in that context, according to the site's author, was, and I quote:

*did a search for "dry as a" and this was the funniest

Perhaps that's what drove the Economist's headline writer.

But I still hungered to know how I was supposed to process the word "donger", and so far, almost all I'd seen other than the aforementioned sites was a host of others referring to people (unfortunately, I presumed) named Donger. Or the Doneger Group, an outfit who really might reconsider their choice of search engine optimization service providers, unless I could come to the conclusion that there's nothing even remotely off-putting about this "donger" which can apparently be found attached to dead "dingoes". How many things could possibly fit such a set of criteria?

And things weren't looking good - I found a site defining "Dinker Donger", and it fit my preconception of the intended meaning. But remember - I had a preconception of what a dingo was, too, so I was willing to ignore that one, since it was a compound phrase, and might be inapplicable as a result. And I continued my search.

Since I was already at the Urban Dictionary site, a site that's clearly almost as authoritative as Wikipedia itself (and that's saying something!), I just used their search function to see if the word could be found, in isolation.

Turns out, it could. And it further turns out that while I suck at identifying common names for Cannis lupus dingo, my initial Spidey-sense that the Economist was having a funny on its readers was correct.

Oh, and according to that eminent authority, the Urban Dictionary, there are several other possible interpretations of the phrase "a dead dingo's donger", given that "dingo" (6th and 7th definitions) isn't always a "mythical (?) dog-like creature of Australia" (1st definition).

Who knew?

The Economist article, by the way, while listed at their site as unavailable to non-subscribers, has already been poached by a free site (though for all I know, they got reprint permission), and synopsified by another. So you can view the cut of its intended jib at either of those two places, if you don't subscribe to the Economist.

I'd have been more forthcoming about the article itself if its contents had had even the slightest thing to do with this post, but they don't, so I wasn't. However, it's an interesting article about an impending environmental crisis in Australia.

Not to repeat myself, but who knew?

[wik] After a casual re-read of this post, to check for typos, it occurred to me I'd missed one other possible interpretation for the CBC head's "retirement". It's the sort of thing James Taranto would have a field day with, if he wrote about articles on defecation and bestiality.

One could, if one didn't read the article, get the impression he was kicked to the curb (or do they spell it "kerb" in the Great White North, like the Brits do?) for having taken a shit (or do they refer to it as "leaving a shit" in the Great White North, like George Carlin used to?) right before launching into an extended dissertation about bestiality. Which might have been even funnier, come to think of it.

Today, the mockery of states continues with the first of far too damn many states beginning with the word "New." This is evidence, I believe, of a serious and startling lack of creativity on the part of our forebears. Couldn't they have done better than naming a state after some pox-ridden, benighted and impoverished British locality where people spoke funny and ate odd cheeses? Apparently, no. Nevertheless, here is the state of New Hampshire.

• The Switzerland of New England; cold, ambivalent and tied to Nazi gold
• Live Free or DIE!
• Like Old Hampshire, only newer
• Taxing out-of-staters since 1804
• We're Just Like Vermont, But Smaller and Cozier
• Yes, it's on the map ... somewhere
• Your Primary Choice
• Rocky soil and stony hearts
• Just Leave Us The Hell Alone
• The Other White Meat
• Mmmm… Maple
• You can’t get there from here
• The State Liquor Store State
• Proud Home of Mary Morse Baker Eddy, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe and other people with two many fucking names
• Mother of tiny, insignificant rivers
• Drive-thru booze!
• Live Free or I won't like you anymore
• Go away, Masshole
• About as exciting as Vermont
• The White Mountain State. Okay, the White Hill State
• The Spotted Newt State
• At least we’re not Vermont
• President Coolidge should have been born here
• The Little Wooden Statue of a Crusty Sailor State
• White Mountains Are Better Than Green
• Here We Cease Our Motion
• Look out for other states (cough… Vermont) masquerading as glorious New Hampshire
• You’d think libertarians would be welcome here. And you’d be wrong.
• We had very little to do with the Revolution
• Ignore those copycat Vermonter scum
• Live Free or Get Very, Very Sick
• The Florida of Canada
• We hate Vermont

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• Taxes, we don't need no stinking taxes!
• Top destination for refugees from Massachusetts
• The pinko-free New England state
• Come for the tax-breaks, stay for the guns

Here's a little something the TSA might find useful.

To review, the bomb:

A bomb:

Today, discover where you are on the normal-autistic spectrum. Are you a candidate for Asperger's syndrome? Do you bang your head on the wall a lot? Find out what it all means!

For the purposes of full disclosure, here are my official, scientific results:

Your Aspie score: 78 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 138 of 200
You are very likely neurotypical

There's been a lot of reports lately about replacements for the venerable, if disappointing, battery. Battery technology has been around for centuries - milennia if you believe the Bagdad Battery is really a battery - but has always suffered from several key flaws as a store of energy. One, it's not a very dense store of energy. Two, it usually contains noxious, acidic, toxic (or all of the above) substances. They're heavy, and often fragile. And they have a goofy name. Several avenues have been investigated - fuel cells, capacitors, and now micro-miniaturized gas turbines. Fuel cells are nifty, I guess. The capacitor idea being developed at MIT has some cool nanotechnology. But this new idea from MIT just has cool written all over its tiny, silicon body.

A gas turbine has several essential components. A compressor, a combustion chamber, and a turbine to generate electricity. Gas turbines have been used for decades, but they range from table top to ship power plant in size. Until now, no one has come close to developing one that is smaller than a quarter. Using the same techniques as chip manufacturers, the researchers at MIT have created the components of their turbine on silicon wafers. Six of these wafers are stacked and bonded together to form a complete engine.

he MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second -- 100 times faster than those in jet engines. A mini-generator produces 10 watts of power. A little compressor raises the pressure of air in preparation for combustion. And cooling (always a challenge in hot microdevices) appears manageable by sending the compression air around the outside of the combustor.

All of the components work, but the team has yet to get it all to work at once. They hope to have a working prototype in operation by Christmas.

If successful, this would be fantastically cool, and useful. If one of these babies can in fact run for ten times as long as a battery of the same weight, that's a major improvement. But the real improvement would lie in the refueling. If these turbines can be refueled rather than recharged, well instead of having to replace whole batteries, a small can of JP5 could recharge anything that runs on electricity. A major drawback of batteries is the lack of interchangeability. My cell phone, iPod, laptop, flashlight, radio controlled car, and wireless mouse all take different types of batteries. If a can of jet fuel looking just like a can of zippo lighter fluid could recharge any battery no matter the size, then you've got a real weight savings. In the military, this would eliminate a severe logistical problem for combat troops. For the average joe, it would be convenient as well, if not a matter of life or death.

Convenience, power, flammable substances, and tiny fan blades whirring at 20,000 rpm. What's not to like?

The other George, fool! :)

Speaking with The Times-Dispatch, Allen said the disclosure is "just an interesting nuance to my background." He added, "I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops."

Everybody repeat after George: I am not a Jew!

Remember the whole "macaca" thing? Turns out that macaca is common slang for n---g-er in French/Northern Africa(Wiktionary). Turns out that Allen's mother is from Tunisia.

Maybe his cradle songs were a little different. Maybe when he said it was a "made-up word" he wasn't being entirely truthful.

Maybe, just maybe, this guy is exactly what he appears to be. Which to me is a very stupid version of Cartman.

Found this fantastic graphic, courtesy of the NO Times-Picayune. It challenges a lot of "common wisdom" about the flooding, with a very clear depiction of how and why flooding occurred. I was curious about the effects of Mr. GO (the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet) on New Orleans during Katrina. Mr. GO is a 70-mile canal dug from the gulf straight through the wetlands to New Orleans' inner harbor, creating a kind of "express highway" for storm surge. It and the other artificial constructs (canals and levees) are the real reason that Katrina had the devastating effect on New Orleans that it did. Each mile of wetlands reduces storm surge by approximately 1 foot, according to what I've read. Wetlands could have reduced away five, ten, or fifteen feet of storm surge if they had been present. By eliminating hundreds of square miles of wetlands over the past 70 years (and even farther back on a more limited scale) the "protection" of New Orleans has resulted in its inevitable destruction. If you watch the graphic, pay close attention to the locations of the levee breaks. The river didn't flood its banks, and neither did the lakes. The breaches occurred at points along the artificial canals.

Each year that the river's sediment has been prevented from being spread out over the flood plain (a natural result of flooding) the land has declined. The sediment has actually ended up out in the gulf, wasted, because the "bird's foot" extension of the Mississippi into the Gulf extends out to the edge of the continental shelf. The bottom line is that the continued survival of the landmass depends on consistent flooding by the river so that that replacement land is created at (or above) the rate at which the soil is removed (into the Gulf).

Enough with the science already. Since I'm writing this post, everyone must be curious as how to how this means Republicans suck. To be fair, it's not just the GOP -- it's been a number of governments not paying attention to the problem. First, the fix.

The fix is an engineering program that uses the Mississippi river like a muddy garden hose, moving it around and "spraying" the delta with the sediment, replenishing over many years what has been taken away. There's universal agreement on both sides of the political aisle that this is the best and only long term solution. The problem is the cost, which prior to Katrina was considered to be absolutely prohibitive.

The price tag was $14 billion, in 2000. The current price tag from Katrina's damage is at $100 billion and climbing. Way back in 2000-2001 politicians of all stripes and bents came together in recognition of the long term problem and solution, and went with their proposals to the federal government. Bush struck nearly the entire program from the budget, replacing it with a single $250 million allocation for further "study". Decades of study had already been done, and the enormously difficult work of pulling together many parts of the political spectrum too. All of this was tossed away like garbage by a President that treats science like an unwanted stepchild.

Around the same time, Bush's "Iraq Recovery Fund" proposed over $100 million in spending to replenish wetlands in Iraq. Congress struck that provision from the package, but it gives you an understanding of the priorities at the time.

$14 billion is what this nation spends every six weeks in Iraq. Iraq is costing this country a sum of money (say a minimum of $500 billion) that could have cured cancer, or introduced a hydrogen infrastructure to the entire continent, or compensated the victims of Katrina many times over. That's what you've given away.

Sure, hindsight is 20-20. And yes, previous governments could have done something about this, and didn't. But Bush was the one who rejected the "real solution" when it was finally put in front of a national politician. And he is the one who presided over emergency mangement so incompetent that people were dying while standing on the interstate after waiting for five days in the sun for a bus to arrive.

Bush wants to talk about anything but New Orleans and Katrina in this election cycle. The same goes for the GOP as a whole. During Katrina, we found out exactly how the Bush administration would react if disaster struck a major American city: They would fuck it up beyond belief, and the well-connected would make money from it.

New Orleans and the disaster's management is the Bush Presidency in a microcosm. Incompetent from top to bottom, winking at corruption, ignorant of science, lacking the common sense necessary to compensate for lack of knowledge, and above all, utterly lacking in compassion for hardship, heartache, death and destruction their policies cause.

Could Bush have prevented Katrina? Of course not. But he could have begun the process, and if the post-hurricane disaster had had anything resembling leadership much suffering would have been prevented.

We have heard hundreds, if not thousands of evocations of Saddam Hussein's evil gassing of his own people, which killed perhaps 5,000 of them in an afternoon. Where does this adminstration note that its policies and activities have resulted in or contributed to the deaths of at least 30,000 Iraqi citizens?

No remorse. No explanations. No admissions of error. In general, no information is provided by this administration other than jingoistic rhetoric directed at staying the course.

You are not safer with these people in charge, or with anyone they've trained or groomed.

In honor of the International Talk Like a Pirate Day, we give you the find your pirate name quiz. My pirate gnomen is bland, but acceptable:

Black John Read

Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the stereotypes. You've got taste and education. Arr!

Canadians are widely seen as the closest thing to being American, world-wide. So what's up with the US government torturing Canadians? Should the Canadian government begin torturing US citizens? As a Canadian living here in the US, I am hopeful that black-masked thugs will not show up in the middle of the night, slap my fiance to the floor, and extradite me to a secret CIA prison in Syria, where I can be tortured into saying just about anything. It won't be hard; I won't last.

As a "guest" of the CIA, Maher Arar confessed, under torture, to having attended weapons training in Afghanistan and being an al-Qaeda member. We know now that he's never been to Afghanistan (or anywhere near it). So good job there on the "interrogation" -- what we've shown is that someone being tortured will say whatever they can to get it to stop.

This guy is a regular guy. He's an engineer who was doing nothing but minding his own business.

If you support Bush's policies in this area, your positions are fairly limited:

• This was wrong and it shouldn't have happened, but you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Nobody was supposed to know.
• This was wrong, it shouldn't have happened, and it's illegal. Someone should be held responsible.
• This was OK because he was a foreigner. Americans don't have anything to worry about.
• This was OK because he was of middle eastern descent. Normal Americans don't have anything to worry about.
• We're in a war and we don't have to explain shit to any other stupid country.

I've left this article plural deliberately. This is the one guy that we know about. Are there others? How many other Canadian citizens has the US government abducted? And where are they?

What's the official position of the US government on compensation for Arar?

The Ministry is recognized the world over for its incisive writing, penetrating insights, and giant fighting robots. And Zombies. Until recently however, this recognition was sadly awardless. That changed forever on the morning of September 12th, when the Ministry received its first ever award.

There was great rejoicing in the Ministry Catastratorium and Piano Bar when, a week later, we discovered that we had won. By Ministry decree, all of the code whittling gnomes, the kobolds in the url mines, various minions, factotums and other oppressed functionaries were granted an unprecedented five minute holiday in recognition of their unstinting (and until now, completely unrewarded) efforts in making the Ministry the blog juggernaut that it is. Of course, it was not merely the little people who found joy in this glorious moment. Minister Johno was in such great shock that he put his beer yeast in the bread dough, and swallowed a saffron-jelly glazed, garlic and truffle stuffed peahen ($139.99/lb.) whole. Ross, overcome with glee, almost posted. Geeklethal nearly caused the death of several small children when, in an excess of bile, he aimed his rifle skyward and fired off a clip. Minister Patton very nearly smiled. And Minister Buckethead had to be revived with smelling salts and a warm mug of cocoa.

We shall treasure this award forever. Or at least until someone else is nice to us. Until then, we bask in the warm glow of the words of Enchiridon:

it's an above average blog