My good ole' buddy Chamille (e:southernyankee) has left us. Yesterday she took off to start her new life in a bigger city, where opportunity surely will knock. But all of us? We're left without her shining presence to give us oomph and wallah-wallah, all night dance parties, and quick trips for milkshakes. I'll be driving alone to work now (maybe I'll even make it on time now 8* ), lonely car rides to a lonelier work place. But overall I'm happy, I can't be sad when it's something I will be doing soon myself, and I can't be sad for something that will lead to so much good, plus a new vacation destination. So farewell, goodbye, and I hope you fit all that stuff into the new place, which you're probably sitting in at this moment, looking around at the beginning of your new life, at what promises to be the next phase of your happiness!

[size=m]I love and will miss you dearly!!![/size]

Over 100,000 civilians have been killed since the Iraqi invasion began. That's the result of a study done by the highly respected scientific journal, the Lancet. "The majority of victims were said to be women and children killed through military activity, the team of American and Iraqi researchers dispatched to the field found. Hundreds of thousands more innocent non-combatants have been injured or maimed." Violence topped the list as the number one killer, with air strikes the foremost cause, and women and children the primary victims.

What strikes me about this figure is just how high it is. Even liberal groups who have been keeping track, like Iraq body count have estimated a death toll in the tens of thousands. Yet the study claims that after sampling over 1000 families its estimate is "conservative" (for example, they did no sampling in some of the worst areas of violence, like Fallujah, where perhaps the most civilians were at risk). Yet the authors stand behind their work, claiming that "This study shows that with moderate funds, four weeks and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained..." I suppose it wouldn't have been too hard for our government to keep its own tally, thereby having its own estimates to use as a counter-weight to this damning report, but as we all know, "we don't do body counts." Well thank god someone does.

MoveOn.org has a new voter protection card, which provides a list of states and DNC voter hotlines, plus emergency numbers to call if there's trouble at the polls.

And a new report by the ACLU called Puged!, details the problems each state had with the last election, the steps they've taken to remedy them (if any), and what we can look forward to facing on Tuesday.

It's gettin' down to the wire.

These guys are just nuts. Excavations on a little Indonesian isle have unearthed the remains of a real life mini-me.http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/28/1098667866340.html?oneclick=true On AM radio I heard them described as somewhere between man and chimpanzee, this picture certainly agrees.




When I downloaded the picture, from above news website, I noticed that the picture is entitled, main real-hobbit. Strange? I guess it's a pretty accurate description though. Little furry human. The artist's rendering does resemble a pigmy with a chimp head, I must say. The best part is they hunted mini-elephants. Can you imagine a cuter pet?!? Maybe we can convince (e:matthew) to make us an artit's rendering of that too.

Space Probe, Cassini, has passed within a couple hundreds of miles of Saturn's moon, Titan. There're some pretty cool pictures so far, though not many cool predictions as of yet. Titan is an anomaly in our solar system, a moon with an atmosphere and a secretive surface lying shrouded under inclement weather. Will we finally find life there? Well, probably not, but the hope is that Titan is very much today what earth was millions of years ago, a place where the conditions are right for some form of life to be realized. I still hope for little green men.


A series of images of Titan.


A neat look at mother Saturn.

(e:paul) may not have any excuses anymore for not loving the little furballs. A new company has already begun accepting orders on a hypo-allergenic cat. Yup, a genetically altered cat, whose RNA has been tweaked so that it produces nearly none of the protein that leads to allergies in humans. They plan to charge $3,500 a piece in the United States and $10,000 each in Japan, ouch, gotta really love the buggers for that hefty price tag (and in Japan, forget it)

Nice mix, mister (e:shawnr) i thank you for the reference, and so, I assure you, does my Itunes. Though, I am having not so much luck with your actual song, Archeteuthis (Squid Hunter), my WMP doesn't seem to want to stream it correctly, hmmmm... I liked the government is watching me very much...

I also like the Eminem link [inlink]shawnr,28[/inlink] quite the little white-bread revolutionary, eh? But really, I respect that he has the guts to just come out and say it, fuck you Bush, WMD that we elected. Let's get rid of 'em, and vote muthafuckas! Slim Shady does put out the hit or two that I find myself jammin to. He's a little over the edge sometimes, but that's better than sittin on the fence.

And, maybe, just maybe, I might think about writing about that dumb game I'm playing. I just hate to take it that seriously, you know what I mean? It takes up enough of my time (not that I do anything very productive with it otherwise...) already. I will think on it though.

Who knew there were so many people running for president? I knew there were the 2 plus 4 or 5 others. I didn't realize there were over 100 of them! Such choice, though of course it all comes down to the binary decision between Dem or Rep. Money money money!

In the future, says George Carlin "at birth, religions will charge people an initial fee of $50,000 and then pretty much leave them alone." Amen, sir! If only I believed in such a bright future...

So (e:jason) [inlink]jason,22[/inlink] the game is pretty darn fun, though it's my first online gaming attempt so I don't really have a good frame of reference for comparison. We have a dual-processor 2.8 gig with a 256 ATI Fire GL X1 and it works very well (I don't think you need that kinda firepower really), though it does kinda tend to take over the whole system and make everything crash once in awhile (mostly when the server you're attempting to contact is too full). Which is the other problem: they have 10 servers but the one my friend signed me up to is the busiest one, and during peek hours (evenings/weekends) it becomes very crowded. Once you're in you're generally OK (if it's too full you may have to wait awhile to even get in), though if you go to a crowded city it can lag a bit. Gameplay is pretty easy. Standard rpg format: kill monsters for experience, level up, earn new spells/techs, buy new weapons/armor (though this is in my opinion is a bit prohibitively expensive for beginners). Leveling is a little slow. I am now level 21 and I've been playing about 3 weeks for usually between 1-3 hours a day (I know, I need a life). You can form groups and go on quests, you can join a clan...there's tons of stuff to do. And the graphics really are pretty darn cool. So, if you want give it a try. I don't think it's too expensive to try out for a month or two. Maybe I'll see you online (though I might reccomend not using the busy server (Bartz) that I am on).

sidenote: Chief Justice Rehnquist just went through surgery for thyroid cancer. The dude's now 80 and has cancer: he's going soon (one way or the other). This is something that really matters for a very very long time. Maybe it'll even sway me to vote for Evil #2 instead of an alternative... I still am not sure who I'm pulling the lever for on Nov. 2, I'm leaving it to my gut to make the final decision (my head is overtired from thinking about it for years now). But, I really don't want to see a courthouse populated by right-wing nuts and Christian fanatics. Really.

Sorry (e:ajay), didn't mean to offend, or give slight with my oh-so-careless use of the "c" word [inlink]ajay,165[/inlink]. I really have no idea how the Flamboya got there, or for that matter how there's bougainvillea in Dehli and San Diego. More of a colonization of agriculture and ideas than people and society. But as you say, India has a long history of colonization (which started way before the whities ever got there). And I agree that tons of cross-border integration can inspire wonderful meshings of concepts, cultures and cuisines.

Actually, in the same book, The Age of Kali Dalrymple visits the island of Réunion which is located miles south of India, halfway between Sri Lanka and Madagascar. There he finds a great mingling of cultures, ranging from exported French convicts to Madagascan ex-slaves with dashes of Tamils, North-Indian Muslims, Canton Chinese, and Yemeni Arabs (most of which were imported originally as slave-labor). Each of these cultures has brought with them a steady stream of peculiarites associated with their native lands, languages, religions, and cuisines. The result, after a couple hundred years is a truly unique blend of all of the above. He is told of an island legend:

"Grandmère Kale, who is said to live in the island's volcano, emerging to eat up Réunionais children who don't finish their homework, is a cross between the witches of European and African folklore, and Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction."

Later a Tamil (a people from Sri Lanka) Catholic priest tells him that, "In the same family you can find a Chinese Taoist, an Indian Muslim, a Metropolitan Catholic, an African witch-doctor and a Tamil Hindu...I have many Chinese Catholics in my parish who are involved in ancestor-worship, as well as Indian ones who believe in reincarnation...it is the same with other religions: the Hindus here all eat meat and perform blood sacrifices...and it probably derives from the African gris gris [voodoo]."

Of course, some of the greatest cross-culture successes arise from the clash of cuisine. On the island they cook a unique brand of Créole which "mixes French and Indian culinary enthusiasm with a dash of Arab, Chinese, and Malagasy influence. The result is a fusion startlingly unlike any of its parent traditions. A typical Réunion meal might consist, for example, of cari z'ourite et cari poulpe (a creamy sea urchin and octopus curry) with a scattering of side dishes of puy lentils, choux choux (crystophene), rougaille (a spicy tomato chutney) and bredes (a spinach-like digestive); pudding might be gâteau patate (a sweet, heavy potato-cake)."

The inhabitants mostly speak French but also use "an impenetrable Créole patois which mixes Malagasy, Tamil and Arabic on a base of eighteenth century nautical French."

Anyone want to go for an extended Indian sea vacation? Of course it's not all happy times, as the mostly poor agrarian residents slowly cope with the rise of international tourism and the complexities which come along. Like many other tourist destinations you find a few harbor towns enjoying the material wealth of vacationers while just a half-hour's walk away dwell farmers who have never used a telephone. The clash of cultures has somehow worked to the islander's advantage now it's time to see how the real clash of a globalized economy will play out on this beautiful melting-pot of an island.

Another book by William Dalrymple, The Age of Kali, mentions the Flamboya tree. I was wondering if this was yet another India-word that we white people have converted. Alas, I find that it's a Mediterranean species, which must have been transplanted to India (like so much else in the colonized world). But who knows, maybe it was the other way around. Yet it is a beauty to behold either way.