WhimsyLand

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If you tried to access Whims this afternoon, it may have failed.  It's turns out that Enom.com, a giant Internic registrar, was down, so when you typed in www.whimsyspeaks.com, there was no Enom to resolve the name into an IP address.  There are over 500 registrars in the US, but over 100 of them actually use Enom to reconcile DNS, so I'm guessing a whole lot of sites were down this afternoon.  Over 10 million sites use Enom for DNS routing.  Imagine how much e-business suffered during the outage.

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CDY was tagged "a billion times" in the 25 Things About Me meme, posted them, and then made them disapparate.  I like the idea of posts-on-a-timer, disappearing after a given period of time.  Blogger should make it a configuration option.

It occurs to me that there are some bloggers about whom 25 things would be interesting, others who already tell us so much about themselves that it's difficult to believe there's anything new to know.

Anyway, here goes:

• I once played ping-pong with O. J. Simpson.
• I've had more wives than children.
• As a kid, I worked with 4 other kids to detach the staples from 4x4's supporting the fence around the Beltway, then rocked them out of the ground, all to build a treehouse.
• Sweet Junie is the light of my life.
• I really don't care what kind of underwear I put on.
• The only street food that my mom let me eat in Iran was pan, a flat bread that went for 3 cents.
• I didn't start writing poetry until I was 49.
• My first PhD dissertation was on blackjack.
• I once held the Annandale High School record for sit-ups and the pole vault.
• I tried marijuana once in 1969, and inhaled.
• I once dreamed about getting a tattoo in the shape of a birthmark.
• I remember absolutely nothing about living in Japan.
• I have two friends that drove 6 hours to Hannover listening to German tapes on St. Patrick's Day and all they could say by the end of the trip was "I am not an Englishwoman".
• I spent most of my freshman year at college playing hearts for money.
• I am terrible at using the same coffee cup, and by the end of the day, the office is littered with them.
• When I was 12, I had visions of making a fortune patenting my catfish bait recipe.
• I own over 2,000 wine corks.
• During the late 70's I kept a Joyce Chen cleaver under my mattress for protection.
• My dad thought most teenage jobs were for sissies, so every summer for years I worked construction, or at Atlas Van Lines.
• I used to catch box turtles with peanut butter.
• I have had my hair cut by a murderer.
• I was 15 minutes late to the National Merit test.
• I didn't know that my sister was my half-sister until I was 27.
• I once sat on top of a mountain of Ethiopian pennies that was 20 feet tall.
• I look just like my picture.

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If you haven't heard, Senator Claire McCaskill is pissed.  She wants legislation limiting the salaries of bank executives taking bail-out money to $400K – chump change for the Thain's of this world, but it's what the President makes.

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Republicans are trying to make life difficult for poor BHO.  Bob Cesca provides a zillion reasons why that isn't going to happen.  Mainly, because he's the smartest guy in the room.


 

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Will Rove be jailed?  One can only hope.

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Old Ratface defends Wall Street mega-bonuses.

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Macroeconomics is astrology.  The usual nonsense by an expert in one field whose political leanings cause him to opine in one in which he has no training.  The last time I encountered this was in the 70's, when I ran across the Institute for Historical Review.  It was the leading Holocaust-denying group at the time, and their literature was filled with members of academia (many from Cal State Long Beach, as I recall).  None of the faculty members was an historian, however.  They were mainly from the hard sciences with a couple of sociologists and shrinks. 

Dr. Frank Tipler, who wrote the "macroeconomics is astrology" article is the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, The Physics of Immorality, and The Physics of Christianity.  Some quotes from the the Wikipedia article:

In his controversial 1994 book The Physics of Immortality,^[4][5][6] Tipler claims to provide a mechanism for immortality and the resurrection of the dead consistent with the known laws of physics, provided by a computer intelligence he terms the Omega Point and which he identifies with God.

Tipler's 2007 book The Physics of Christianity analyzes the Omega Point Theory's pertinence to Christian theology.^[10] In the book, Tipler identifies the Omega Point as being the Judeo-Christian God, particularly as described by Christian theological tradition. In this book Tipler also analyzes how Jesus Christ could have performed the miracles attributed to him in the New Testament without violating any known laws of physics, even if one were to assume that we currently don't exist on a level of implementation in a computer simulation (in the case that we did, then according to Tipler such miracles would be trivially easy to perform for the society which was running the simulation, even though it would seem amazing from our perspective).

According to George Ellis's review of Tipler's book in the journal Nature, Tipler's book on the Omega Point is "a masterpiece of pseudoscience ... the product of a fertile and creative imagination unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical discipline".

I don't mean this to be an ad hominem argument, I just mean to point out that you have to consider the source.


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I think I'll change the list of 25 all day.

Hey, Robert!  I turn 60 next year, and I'm keeping you to your promise.

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Colbert asks about Prufrock.  He also has a "mountain in his pants".  It's not a metaphor.  Thanks to Emily for this one.