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Terry's Journal

terry
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11/01/2004 11:13 #35649

Bye bye good friend
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]

10/29/2004 10:59 #35648

It's got to stop
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.

10/28/2004 11:26 #35647

5 days away...
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.

10/28/2004 00:29 #35646

Don't call 'em little people
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.


image

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.

10/27/2004 12:03 #35645

Cassini cats
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.

image
A series of images of Titan.

image
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)