Jeff just sent me a pretty funny email:

Subject: pretending marriage

A man and a woman, who have never met before, find themselves assigned to

the same sleeping room on a transcontinental

train.

Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, the two are

tired and fall asleep quickly…he in the upper bunk and she in the lower.

At 1:00 AM, he leans over the side and gently wakes the woman saying,

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the

closet to get me a second blanket? I’m awfully cold.”

“I have a better idea,” she replies. “Just for tonight, let’s pretend that

we’re married.”

“Wow! That’s a great idea!!” he exclaims.

“Good,” she replies. “Get your own blanket!”

After a moment of silence, he farted.

26 years old and I still laugh at fart jokes…

Lots of very good Falluja analysis at the Belmont Club.

My school newspaper seems to think that exploiting peoples’ losses for political propoganda is the way to go.

Today, there’s this editorial, arguing that Tami Silicio shouldn’t have been fired for taking pictures of military coffins in Kuwait and then giving permission for a newspaper to publish them.

Yesterday, Nathan Valentine argued that anybody who wants to should be allowed to take pictures of peoples’ loved ones, whether “missing legs or … dead in caskets.” He argued that along with making a whole lot of silly anti-Bush asides.

Let me set the record straight for you nitwits… Or rather, since I’m taking a few days off, I’ll point you to Donald Sensing’s experienced take, which leads to Sgt. Stryker’s description of the transportation of war dead from the perspective of an AF ground crewmember, which mentions that “[t]he only thing that would tip you off that HR are aboard would be one guy hanging around until the remains are offloaded and on their way to the mortuary,” which leads to the perspective of that one guy who ensures the remains are treated with dignity and respect from Dover AFB to the family of the fallen trooper.

If you only read one of those, read the last one. It may be long but it’s beautifully written and deserves your attention. It’ll make you feel very, very small and insignificant… Maybe even the Nathan Valentines of the world, who think they can speak for those fighting this war: “But ask anybody who’s been involved in a war (which would exclude the president and his inner circle), and I bet they will tell you [not displaying human remains in "an effort to sanitize war"] is not appealing.” Shame on these sophomoric propogandists. And shame on you to whom this rhetorical, hollow reasoning appeals.

Update: Read into this what you will. I respect that man and value his opinion.

Well, one more… Kurt Warner is being released by the Rams. Our starter will be Marc Bulger, a fine quarterback and a gentleman, and his backup will be the Crystal Chandelier. We drafted QB Jeff Smoker from Big Ten school Michigan State in the sixth round. I figured he’d have gone higher than that.

It just occured to me that Illinois went 1-11 this football season. Jeepers cripes!

I got kind of ticked off earlier today reading the comments of a particular fool made on this post of Sgt. Hook’s. And now I’m really pissed off after seeing this, linked by Lileks. I think I might step away from posting here for a few days. I’m having a lot of fun working on my research projects right now. I’m really impressed with how clever the techniques in the text normalization system are. I’m looking forward to getting all the modules integrated and seeing how this puppy will run. My acoustic phonetics research is keeping me asking questions, and finding answers for them; a truly great feeling. In other words, I’m taking a break from thinking about the real world and immersing myself in work. There’s only about two weeks left to this semester. For those who care, posting will be intermittent in that time.

I just read this insightful essay by Trent Telenko about Iran’s strategy in their war against us with the battleground in Iraq. Chilling.

It was written a while ago, but on a related topic, today is Israel’s birthday, or at least there are students on the quad celebrating it today. Of course, there’s a large group of Palestinian protesters out there trying to disrupt the good times. I heard them chanting while on my way to class earlier; saw a policeman with a glock on the way back, making sure nothing happens. This happens every year… I’m going to step outside in a little bit, maybe there’s something to see still out there.

Once again, let’s make fun of Pravda:

Pravda used to be the mouthpiece of the communist Soviet state, and their fall from past glory obviously has left a bitter, bitter taste. Like in this article, about the horrible train wreck in North Korea. The writer considers the media unreasonably biased for pointing out that North Korea is not an ideal place to live, and seems to blame it on US-mandated sanctions. I think the problems in NK go a whole lot deeper, and have more to do with their government’s policies than with ours.

There’s a fundraising drive going around the blogosphere right now, raising money for Spirit of America. The SoA fundraising effort is to pay for Iraqi TV stations to counter the extraordinarily hateful messages and reportage of al-Jazeera, and for other hearts-and-minds campaigns being run by the Marine Corps in the particularly ugly region NW of Baghdad. For some insight into al-Jazeera’s tactics, read this.

Some of the big boys are auctioning off stuff in their comment sections, and donating the money to SoA.

Cox and Forkum is offering the original artwork for this cartoon, and the bidding is currently at $650.

Citizen Smash sold a hat for $110.

Beth auctioned off some plane tickets for an undisclosed amount.

John sold a training round for the big gun on the A-10 Warthog (the last of the close air support fixed wing aircraft), and a truly amazing gun. (Update: Oops, forgot about the harrier.) There’s a picture of it, without the airplane around it, next to a volkswagon on the post. Check it out.

Not to be outdone, Rosemary offers up some pictures of her boobs.

I have neither boobs nor cool ammo (.40 S & W is all I keep handy), but I suggest donating to the cause if you have the means and want to get a jump on next year’s tax liability. Smash is keeping pretty good track of who’s offering what if you want to bid for something cool with your donation. And the more money that goes through these alliance biddings, the more likely it is that such things will happen in the future. And everyone likes big ordnance and boobies.

(Syntactic ambiguity: intentional.)

My grass had been getting long and the dandelions were growing bark, so I figured this weekend I’d better cut the grass. I picked up some fresh gas and bought some 30 weight motor oil, changed the oil in my mower, then started cutting. I finished half of the back yard, the big freaking side yard, and the front yard. On my way to finish up the rest of the back yard, I walked along the side of the house and noticed some weed plants growing out of an old flowerbed that I’m set to recover in the next few weeks. I’ve got a whole bunch of plants in pots out back waiting to go into the ground, including some of my favorite flowers, the Iris. My girlfriend’s horticulturist sister is going to plan out all the beds for me, so it’s guaranteed to look fantastic (I also got most of the plants from her for free). Back to the story, I’ve got the mower running and I see these plants that shouldn’t be there. I did what any guy would do, straddling the mower half in the flowerbed, and half out and mowed down all the weed plants. More like mowed down half of them, because I forgot about the sump-pump drain pipe that sits on the edge of that bed. The blade hit the pipe, cut about an inch through it, then broke off of the shaft connecting it to the engine. Fortunately, the blade didn’t fly off and cut my legs off at the ankle.

But needless to say, I’m in the market for a new lawnmower.

I can’t figure out what the lyric in Riders on the Storm is: “Like a dog without a bone and …..” Googling reveals either “an actor out on loan” or “an actor out alone.” That song was just playing in the shower and it sounded like he said something about Hector. Being the pseudo-intellectual he was, it wouldn’t surprise me if he threw in an Illiad reference like that. Not sure what it would mean though…

According to the email I got from his campaign, my favorite politician, Bret Schundler, is leading incumbent Jim McGreevey in polls for the 2005 NJ gubernatorial race by 7 points. Notice that I used a cataphoric pronoun in that sentence. I’m a freak.

Here’s a beautiful article about Pat Tillman published last April (or December). He’s the Arizona Cardinal strong safety who turned down a 3.6 million dollar contract extension to sign up with the US Army and go Ranger, along with his brother in the Cleveland Indians organization.

Pat was killed in Afghanistan today.

Here’s an interesting article about the Cardinals new VP of Player Development and about baseball statistics in general. Apparently being a good fantasy baseball manager can earn you a job. Who’d have thunk it?

On a completely different subject, Laser Fart is exceptional.

Update: Back to the same subject, the Cards won a slick pitching duel in the 12th. And on that other subject, Laser Fart is still hilarious.

Cardinals go up against the Astros tonight in chance to sweep a series in Houston. Just two days ago, I was joking with a co-worker that we had a chance to tie up with Houston if we could just sweep them. At the time, it was funny, but tonight it’s a possibility. Think I’m going to try my best to catch a few innings on the radio, or maybe even satellite tv.

Been very busy lately. Crunch time is upon us. My team has one week to integrate all our modules into a text normalization system, something that takes as input raw text and outputs raw text that would be suitable for a text-to-speech system, so the abbreviations are expanded and numbers are written out in the way you’d read them. It was a really interesting project, a lot more was involved than it probably sounds like. I’ve also got to put together a major pilot experiment. I’m trying to figure out whether intonational environment eliminates the cue of F0 (the glottal rate of vibration) for voicing contrasts for English stops consonants. Also probably a lot more involved than it sounds. Plus I’m always looking for time to work on my old anaphora paper, which is just almost nearly done. Just need to review some old materials to make sure what I’ve figured out means what I think it does. I’m not too smart, ya know, and sometimes go way off track. Haven’t had as much time to keep up with the news as I’d like, but Andrew Sullivan has an interesting letter to show you about the situation in Iraq, and a U of I trustee has ordered a review of campus policy regarding protests. That seems like a good idea. Nancy Cantor, our temporary rent-a-chancellor, decided to give in to the students who occupied a campus building for 33 hours last week, since the fact that she’ll be leaving here with the Chief in place is a nasty thorn in her side, a gap in her left-wing hat of feathers, to mix metaphors as awkwardly as possible. (To recap, she put in place the Michigan “points-system” affirmative action policy that is about as genuinely racist and insulting a policy as you’ll find out there; then she came here to get rid of the Chief; who knows what she’ll accomplish at Syracuse…) So anyways, she invited more criminal activity by allowing this cornball sit-in to produce results, albeit non-consequential ones. This trustee orders a review of policy, because what happens next time Matt Hale’s cult comes to town and his student cohorts occupy a building to get him a meeting with the administration? Me personally, I’m old-fashioned, and into playing by the rules.

I figured out yesterday how to translate the copula into dynamic intensional logic, an indefinitely high-ordered, typed logic; and have shown that it works a few times today. This means that I know what the definition of is is. Think I’ve earned a trip to the batting cages this evening.

I just found out that the NSA is planning on hiring 1,500 new people per year for the next five years. That’s where I’ve wanted to work since 2001. I should finish my PhD in 2-1/2 to 3 more years, putting me in the five-year window, and making it possible that they’d hire me. That would be super.

Just got done reading the article on the “bombshell memo.” It made some useful suggestions, although I don’t see how they can be implemented. One of the biggest mistakes mentioned is the overcentralization of the current transitional government, blamed on the CPA’s reluctance to venture beyond the Green Zone. The Governing Council members appointed ministers nepotistically, and the transitional government is cronyistic and corrupt (although it appears that some of the worst offenders have left the GC). It would have been better to focus on regional governments, the town-sized governments composed of freely elected citizens (elected with little fanfare in our press); and allow an emergent structure determine the appearance of the national transitional government. That would have put the focus on Iraqi accomplishments, and would have involved everyone much more. Admittedly, the GC’s purpose was supposed to be to get the infrastructure back online; it appears they have usurped more influence than intended. There’s too much to sum up, read the whole thing (don’t miss page 2).

Then couple that with this post from Zeyad, where it sounds like the CPA PR wing is approaching the credibility of Baghdad Bob. I have faith in the capability of the people we sent over there; I just hope the soldiers’ and marines’ efforts to improve things at the local level aren’t being hamstrung by civilian blunders, and trying to do too much, at the national level.

Looks like there’s going to be some sweet storms today. The thunder is rocking my crib. Sure picked a good day to have my first barbecue of the spring.

My friend Jim spent last summer in Mosul, which was surprisingly peaceful at the time. He told me about these giant half spider/half scorpion critters, called Camel Spiders that are a big problem over there. He saw one eating a dog, and another attacked one of his fellow soldiers in his sleep. He went to bed without a mosquito net, and woke up with one of these creatures eating his chest. They apparently have some sort of an anesthetic in their saliva. Anyways, here’s a picture of two of these creatures, sent to me this morning by Peter.