Smoke Break

Rich, my brother, just put the trailer to his film "Smoke Break" on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7l2LLI14IE
 
I think he's having a release party sometime in October, although I'm not sure yet.
 
Enjoy.

Pride

Mike proudly stands next to the urinal in his 'ice house'.

For the rest of the photos, check out the photo set on Flickr: 20070908-The Urinal

Irish's garage/ice house

The urinal in Mike's garage

mike and i hung the urinal in his garage/ice house. ;-)

Prepositions

I looked up the word "preposition." I had been thinking of the rule that states that a sentence should never end with a preposition. I discovered the rule is false. Apparently the rule is true for Latin and was ported over and applied to English erroneously.

I especially like Winston Churchill's quote (in the "usage note" section):

Preposition

prep·o·si·tion [prep-uh-zish-uhn] –noun Grammar.

any member of a class of words found in many languages that are used before nouns, pronouns, or other substantives to form phrases functioning as modifiers of verbs, nouns, or adjectives, and that typically express a spatial, temporal, or other relationship, as in, on, by, to, since.

Usage Note: Usage Note: It was John Dryden who first promulgated the doctrine that a preposition may not be used at the end of a sentence, probably on the basis of a specious analogy to Latin. Grammarians in the 18th century refined the doctrine, and the rule has since become one of the most venerated maxims of schoolroom grammar. But sentences ending with prepositions can be found in the works of most of the great writers since the Renaissance. English syntax does allow for final placement of the preposition, as in We have much to be thankful for or I asked her which course she had signed up for. Efforts to rewrite such sentences to place the preposition elsewhere can have stilted and even comical results, as Winston Churchill demonstrated when he objected to the doctrine by saying "This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put." Sometimes sentences that end with adverbs, such as I don't know where she will end up or It's the most curious book I've ever run across, mistakenly thought to end in prepositions. One can tell that up and across are adverbs here, not prepositions, by the ungrammaticality of I don't know up where she will end and It's the most curious book across which I have ever run. It has never been suggested that it is incorrect to end a sentence with an adverb.

Harry Lime

I ran across this quote somewhere earlier today and thought that it was worth mentioning.
 

A certain Harry Lime once famously explained that "in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance", whereas in Switzerland they had "brotherly love ... 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock".

 

Is 1984 Our Future?

Do you like big brother?  If you think giving the government more power over is is a good idea, then I urge you to read this article:

My baby will be taken from me the moment it's born

The daughter of teachers and with a glittering academic future, Fran was delighted when she became pregnant. But social services discovered the illness she thought she'd put behind her - and will confiscate her daughter when she is born...

A 22 year-old mother to be in the UK is to have her child taken from her by the government immediately after birth.  Why?  Because in her teens she suffered trauma that for several years lead her to 'self-hurt' and to be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Her own doctor says she's basically made a full recovery.  Yet the government thinks it's averting a potential tragedy.

I liken this story to the movie Minority Report, in which people are arrested before any crime is committed.

This is big government.

This is big brother.

The is our future if we're not careful.

Zimbabwe's Crisis Grows

Zimbabwe has been in bad shape for years.  Under the dictator Robert Mugabe, the country has been oppressed and is now in an economic nightmare thanks to Mugabe's denial of economics.  That's right, he's openly stated that he has no time for "bookish economics" or economists as a whole. 
 
To this end, his following statement is absolute nonsense:

President Mugabe has accused foreign governments of trying to interfere in Zimbabwe's affairs - saying some businesses had raised prices without justification as part of a Western plot to oust him.

For Zimbabwe's sake, Mugabe had better fall fast.
 
[The following article is from the BBC]
 

Zimbabwe flour shortage warning 
 
Bread shortages could further boost inflation

Zimbabwe's main bread producer has warned it only has two days' supply of flour, state media have reported.

The company, Lobels Bread, said a flour shortage had already forced it to scale back its operations by 80%.
 
Reports say 36,000 tonnes of imported wheat are blocked in a Mozambican port owing to foreign exchange shortages.
 
A foreign currency crisis caused inflation to rise to 7,638% in July. Government price controls have been blamed for worsening shortages.
 
Lobels' operations director, Lemmy Chikomo, said stocks would run out after two days if they were to cease production.
 
He said the firm could only guarantee 40,000 loaves of bread per day, as opposed to 200,000 previously.
 
Critics have blamed President Mugabe's policies, especially the seizure of farms, for ordinary Zimbabweans' hardship.
 
For his part, President Mugabe has accused foreign governments of trying to interfere in Zimbabwe's affairs - saying some businesses had raised prices without justification as part of a Western plot to oust him.

 

Che Guevara

I found this to be an interesting article from the Houston Chronicle.

 
Fresh from CIA scrapbook: A lock of Che's hair

MIAMI — A former CIA operative and Cuban exile plans to auction what he
says is a lock of Che Guevara's hair, snipped before the Argentinian
revolutionary and friend of Fidel Castro was buried in 1967.

Gustavo Villoldo, 71, was involved in Guevara's capture in the jungles
of Bolivia, according to unclassified U.S. records and other documents.
He plans to auction the hair and other items kept in a scrapbook since
the joint CIA-Bolivian army mission 40 years ago.

"It's time for me to put the past behind and pass these on to someone
else," said Villoldo, also a veteran of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs
invasion of Cuba.

The scrapbook also holds a map used to track down Guevara in Bolivia,
photos of Guevara's body, intercepted messages between Guevara and his
rebels and a set of Guevara's fingerprints taken before his burial.

It's hard to predict how much the collection will net at auction
because there is nothing comparable on the market, said Tom Slater,
director of the Americana department at Heritage Auctions of Dallas,
which will put the collection on the block Oct. 25-26.

"We cannot recall ever having seen artifacts relating to Che's dramatic
career and death appearing on the auction market, and we expect this
offering to excite broad bidder interest," Slater said.

The Cuban government announced in 1995 that its anthropologists had
uncovered Guevara's remains from Bolivia, and re-interred them in Cuba
without doing DNA testing. Villoldo and other exiles and experts say
the body is still in Bolivia.


Brought to you by the HoustonChronicle.com

 

@ the incubus concert

Monica, Heather, Mike and I at the Incubus concert in The Woodlands.

See the rest of the photo set here: Incubus [Flickr]