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by George Ziemann 2010 January 3, 2010 -- Lots of lists out right now. Here's an interesting one -- 50 Things We Didn't Know This Time Last Year. Science -- Someone in Malta (Dr Songtao Shi, to be exact) figured out that when baby teeth grow out, you shouldn't put them under the pillow, because they're loaded with stem cells and no moral guilt is attached to using them since they fall out naturally and we usually just throw them away anyhow. "Parents who register for the service will receive a collection kit, which includes instructions on how to preserve the tooth before sending it to the BioEDEN laboratories. Once the child's tooth falls out parents simply need to place the tooth in the storage container provided, which is then filled with fresh milk and sent to the UK. From this one tooth the BioEDEN laboratories are able to extract and store a minimum of 1,000,000 stem cells." "The stem cells are stored in the gaseous stage of liquid nitrogen for years and are only retrieved when the child or another member of the family needs to use them." Internet Oddity -- I was just checking my stats for music downloads and, mysteriously, the total is about 45,000 less than it was a few months ago. My last full printout of the report was in July. The current reports of the same months gives me a total that is 20,000 less than the July report. I've crossed the half-million mark twice now this year, only to see the numbers change significantly. But I left out three years (data disappeared when one provider upgraded their system, or was sold to a new owner), so my "More than half a million served" thing on the music page is still accurate. Not that I expect anyone to question me about it. It is a bizarre thing, though. Maybe people are putting the songs back. All I know for sure is that I can't trust my statistics package (Urchin). January 8, 2010 -- Headline in today's Washington Post -- "Obama Takes the Blame." That's at least twice in his first term. Bush never admitted that he made any mistakes in 8 years. Things Not To Do at a Biker Rally -- #7 January 9, 2010 -- A group of people in Pennsylvania, maybe delirious from cabin fever or possibly inspired by hallucinogenics and a Hunter S. Thompson book, decided to use a biker rally as a launch zone for their "War on Leather." Now three activists are missing, and two others were found duct-taped "in several dumpsters," which doesn't sound good. The organizer of the protest is quoted as saying,"Something went wrong -- horribly, horribly wrong." Ya think? And really, WTF did they expect was going to happen? "You know, Snake, this guy has a point. Do we really still have to wear leather jackets to have a club?" "Uh, the leather jackets keep out the cold and rain, dumbass." "Yeah, but we could switch to snowmobile suits and our ol' ladies could move all the patches..." "And what do we wear in the summer? Matching t-shirts? Knitted sweaters for the fall? Who let your lame ass into this club anyway?" It wasn't even going to end well that way. January 16, 2010 -- There's something about the Susan Boyle story that appeals to me, if only that her success came in spite of all the factors working against her -- the small hamlet in Scotland, the lack of stage experience, the fact that she was not a radiant beauty. Sadly, I think she's already melting down. January 17, 2010 -- If we had given the same response to Haiti as we did to New Orleans after Katrina, we wouldn't be there yet. January 20, 2010 -- A "hole" has been found in Windows that has been there since 1993, from Windows 3.1 all the way to Windows 7. This confirms my speculation that Microsoft hasn't actually written any new system software since Windows 3 (and I'm not even sure about that). Instead, they're still patching it, renaming it and reselling it to PC users again and again. January 21, 2010 -- The link I followed and the title of the video it leads to say, "Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934." The "drug use" in the cartoon is a merely a patient in a dentist office receiving laughing gas for toothache pain. The patient is a clown; Betty Boop draws the dentist office and then tries to perform an extraction before resorting to laughing gas. Oddly enough, after watching it, I was pretty sure that drugs had been involved. January 27, 2010 -- The world is all a-buzz or a-twitter or a-something about Apple's iPad, which everyone is writing about today -- in spite of the fact that they haven't actually seen one in real life yet (much less used one). Yesterday, they didn't even know what it looked like; today, everyone has an opinion. January 30, 2010 -- Due to a blizzard, icy roads, and sub-freezing temperatures to keep them that way, "Arkansas State Police warned people who were driving to work on Friday to be prepared to be stranded." Neighboring states simply closed the highways. That sends a pretty clear message. But telling them on Friday morning to "prepare to be stranded" seems (to me) to suggest that not only are the roads still open, but you should run out right now and buy the things you need. Hurry! Prepare!! Maybe the idea is to get everyone stranded at WalMart. February 2, 2010 -- Mass Drug Overdose -- None Dead February 2, 2010 -- If you watched the Grammys, you may (or may not) have noticed that Hurricane Alley didn't win one. Not terribly surprising, since we only sold about a dozen copies. Ironically, Neil Young just got his first Grammy, a night or two after his rock-star friends did a tribute concert for him, performing an entire evening of songs the Grammys overlooked. How important can it really be? February 4, 2010 -- Why Microsoft won't be leading the way into the future (from a former Microsoft Vice President). Defending Taylor Swift -- From Scott Borchetta, president and chief executive of Big Machine Records, explaining Taylor Swift's questionable performance with Stevie Nicks at the Grammys: "Maybe she's not the best technical singer, but she's probably the best emotional singer because everybody else who gets up there and is technically perfect, people don't seem to want more of it." I'm not even sure I understand what that means, but it makes it sound like she can't sing along with anyone else that is in key. It also seems to imply that Stevie Nicks is a "perfect" singer. I like Stevie, but I don't think even she would call herself perfect. The truth of the matter seems to involve Swift getting the wrong monitor mix fed into her ear, which is not only more plausible but, unlike the babble from the record exec, doesn't cast aspersions on her ability to sing with "perfect" singers. February 5, 2010 -- Just read an excerpt at Sports Illustrated from James S. Hirsh's book, Willie Mays, The Life, The Legend, which got me to thinking about baseball. It's one of the few sports a short, scrawny kid has a chance at, which is why I played baseball every summer from age 9 to high school, although having a job kept me off the team when I was a senior. My true baseball fandom went from the early 60s to the mid-70s. I lived in Toledo. We were Detroit Tigers fans, although we also had the Tigers' farm team, the Toledo Mud Hens. Now I live in Phoenix, so we're kind of Diamondback fans, although I don't really pay a lot of attention to it. The basic rules of the games are the same. Scandals come and go. But my diminished attention to the game is because something substantial has changed over the years. When I was a kid, baseball was the perfect example of teamwork. A team playing together, knowing what each other will do, unspoken signals and signs... That makes a game fun, win or lose. And our favorite teams stayed together. Without looking it up, the Detroit Tigers in the 60s contained: Catcher -- Bill Freeman 1st base -- Norm Cash 2nd Base -- Dick McAuliffe Shortstop -- Ray Oyler 3rd Base -- Don Wert Outfield -- Willie Horton, Al Kaline, Jim Northrup, Mickey Stanley, Gates Brown, Rocky Colavito Pitchers -- Mickey Lolich, Denny McClain, Jim Bunning, Don Mossi, Frank Lary For the most part, the team remained the same for what seemed to be forever, although someone would inevitably get hurt, introducing a new face from time to time. It was a team. A few years ago, the Diamondbacks won the World Series. When the next season started, the key players (Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson and others) were gone. If I were a kid and these guys had become my heroes, I would have been crushed. I think it's hard to be a loyal fan these days because of this. February 7, 2010 -- Critics have been howling at Hollywood for a few years now about having run out of ideas, but they've finally hit the one that I've had in my head for a long time as the sign they've reached rock bottom. They're making a Stretch Armstrong movie. This toy didn't show up until the mid 1970s, so I was already out of high school and wasn't into playing with dolls, er, I mean, action figures. I never thought G.I. Joe was more than a doll, either. Regardless, the most remarkable thing I remember about Stretch Armstrong was that it really didn't do a damn thing. You could stretch it out. It would slowly retract back to its original shape. That was it. It seemed like a really stupid toy. In fact, the young kids that I saw play with one tended to pick it up, stretch it, laugh, drop it and move on to something else. This is going to be a movie? What is it going to be? A story about a stretchy guy that everyone likes to tie to things with his own arms and legs? Please, not a superhero. He doesn't stretch on his own, someone else has to do that to him. Maybe if it's a comedy... February 15, 2010 -- This should be a new topic entirely, but I'll lay the foundation here. I'm going to call it something like "Incredibly Stupid Ideas of the 21st Century." Before I go back through the Bush years for the comedy gold, we can start with a story in the Los Angeles Times, which discusses the genius idea of Utah's s state Senator, Chris Buttar. He wants to make a few educational cuts, namely to completely eliminate the 12th grade since "many seniors frittered away their final year of high school" anyway. The more rational of Utah's residents convinced him to back off (now he's shooting for 12th grade as optional), but a state Senator seriously entertained the thought of axing senior year, thought it was a good enough idea to suggest publicly, and initially got some support. That's a lot of stupid in one spot. Arizona has been last in education for so long, it's good to see a new challenger on the horizon. February 21, 2010 -- A quick trip back to 1995, for a glimpse into the mind of a close-minded anti-visionary, who offers a whole page of things that will never work, every one of which did, in fact, work just fine. Follow-up question -- Are the requirements to write for magazines like Newsweek still this low? I could write something at least this accurate on a daily basis. Different thought -- In light of the Stretch Armstrong issue (see Feb. 7 entry), I have a new vision for the definition of the complete bottom of the barrel, should it ever appear -- Pet Rock: The Movie Killer Konservatives From 1926 -- "Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. "By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons-kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added-up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly." In the 1970s, the government sprayed Mexican marijuana fields with the toxin Paraquat, using the same amoral logic. More on this at Slate, but I would point out that the FDA is in charge of cigarettes now and they have already changed the composition. I have no problem believing that the government would intentionally kill smokers. As we can see, it's well within what they are capable of. March 26, 2010 -- Being an old codger, this caught my attention: Memory Decline Linked to an Inability to Ignore Distractions ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2010) - One of the most common complaints among healthy older adults relates to a decline in memory performance. This decline has been linked to an inability to ignore irrelevant information when forming memories. In order to ignore distracting information, the brain should act to suppress its responses to distractions, but it has been shown that in older adults there is in fact an increase in brain activity at those times. My memory is still pretty good, although I occasionally have an inability to find the correct word I'm looking for. Always been bad with names, unless there's a name tag, which increase my chances of remembering it. I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not after reading this article. But I can ignore distractions -- like wiring up a recording session while someone is playing drums and three people are asking "George, can we...?" at once. Complex relational database programming also almost requires this ability to get to the concentration level I need to do it well. Same with playing music -- once a song starts, anything not onstage is irrelevant. Jack Welch, who used to run GE, said that he ignored everything that was presented to him for the first time. Only 20 percent of them ever came back for a second try, and he never had to waste his time on the 80 percent that didn't. April 11, 2010 -- The month of April started out with Virginia's governor issuing a proclaimation declaring it to be Confederate History Month (or something like that), and recapped the glorious history of the Confederacy in the 1860s without once mentioning the whole slavery thing. I wasn't really surprised that some people complained about this oversight. I was kind of taken aback by the number of people taking the position that the Civil War had nothing at all to do with slavery. Maybe it's because I grew up in Toledo, one of the last stops on the Underground Railway (another 50 miles to Detroit, across the Detroit River and into Canada) and decidedly Yankee territory, but this would have been a wrong answer on any history test I ever took. April 15, 2010 -- Twisting the Facts -- The link at Reddit says, "Obamas pay $1.8 million in taxes, no deduction taken for donating the entire $1.4 million for the Noble prize money which he donated to charities." While this is technically correct, it turns into a non-story when you follow the link and discover that the $1.4 million in Nobel (not Noble) prize money wasn't taken as a deduction because it wasn't declared as income. So, in addition to not knowing how to spell, the person that submitted the link either didn't read the story correctly, missed a big chunk of it, or knew exactly what they were talking about and chose to write a headline that would intentionally give the wrong impression and irk conservatives. I think that last choice is the most likely. As much fun as that might be, Obama supporters too lazy to actually click on the link will file it away as a fact. Later they'll use it in a half-drunk bar debate and either turn out looking like a fool (if someone knows the full story), or the inaccurate truth gets spread further. In the end, it doesn't do anyone any good. However, I did learn that writing a book that sells pays a helluva lot better than being the vice president. I guess this makes sense, though. Despite what Dick Cheney will tell you, being VP has exactly two duties -- breaking a tie in the Senate and waiting around in case the Prez doesn't live out his term. If neither of these two events happen, he could spend 4 years surfing the Internet or on the White House roof, keeping up his tan, and still faithfully have fulfilled the duties of his elected office. May 11, 2010 -- Tea Party Logic -- I really wanted to respond to this at the Washington Post, which is where the discussion appears, but they recently redesigned and I can't seem to log in. One thing caught my eye, from a self-declared member of the Tea Party: "just plain folks that want less taxes, social welfare programs, foreign aid, and fair taxes....we are tired of the spending. We want it STOPPED!" Hmmm... Less taxes and fair taxes may be mutually exclusive. Beyond that, the things they want to stop spending on (social services and foreign aid) wouldn't be an issue if we weren't spending billions upon billions on wars, which didn't even make the list of things they're annoyed about, despite being the one thing that's been sucking money like a Hoover for 7 years now. May 31, 2010 -- A New York Times story about the Israeli raid on an aid flotilla, we find this gem of logic. "A military statement said two activists were later found with pistols they had taken from Israeli commandos. The activists, the military said, had apparently opened fire 'as evident by the empty pistol magazines.'" Just my opinion of course, but it would seem that the odds of taking away the gun of anyone the military would call a "commando" before it was already empty are really, really slim.

Quotes "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- shewfig (slashdot) "Money is counterproductive; it prevents happiness to come." -- Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder, on why he is giving all of his money away "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" -- Albert Einstein WTF? Quotes "We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama." -- Rudy Giuliani