In the combox for the Famous Liger Post (which continues to get hits from Google every day from what I can tell), a schoolgirl writes:
i love ligers all my techers said they did not egist……but now i have proof!!!
Thanks for making my day with my favorite comment in a long time!
Go show those teachers!
Be careful how you express your fondness for ligers, though. It’s better to admire them from a distance for safety reasons.
Hooo-EEEEE!
Man!
That thing will break mirrors, won’t it!
This here critter is a naked mole rat, as you may know, and it has been voted one of the top 10 ugliest animals on LiveScience.Com.
Personally, I don’t agree with all the votes.
In fact, the contest has an INEXPLICABLE omission: It left out the ugliest critter of all time, the sanity-shattering STAR-NOSED MOLE.
Nevertheless, there’s some critters over at LiveScience.Com whose visages will curdle milk, make paint peel, and send small children scurrying away in fright.
A reader writes:
I know you will appreciate having a copy of the official Vatican program for the Funeral Mass and Burial Rites for Pope John Paul II. I have attached to this e-mail a PDF format of the official program. It is in two files. The program includes everything–including the "non-public" rites celebrated inside St. Peter’s Basilica just before and just after the public rites outside in the square.
I definitely do appreciate it! It’s a fascinating read (though it is in Latin and Italian). Having these available is a great good.
Only thing I’m not sure about is the file format. I think St. Paul was pretty firm on rejecting the idea that we should use evil file formats that good may result. ;-D
One of the sub-sets of modern music that I enjoy is that of historical songs, or songs that reference history in neat ways. Gordon Lightfoot’s Edmund Fitzgerald is good, but his Canadian Railroad Trilogy will make the little hairs stand up on your neck. Al Stewart has some good ones, as well as The Band and others.
So I’m driving around in my SUV (168,000 miles and counting!) and listening to Dire Straits playing Telegraph Road and I look up and notice that I am driving on our very own "Old Wire Road". It runs brokenly through about 3 counties here locally and is obviously, well, old. It is the road that ran along the original telegraph route through these parts, and runs smack past a Civil War battlefield, also. The Dire Straits song is about another telegraph road, around Detroit, and the changes it brings to the generations that grow up around it. Mark Knopfler’s worn-leather voice and lyrics hauntingly capture the emptiness of blind progress, and he can also play guitar like crazy.
Some pictures and info about the road, the song and how Mr. Knopfler was inspired to write it, can be found HERE.
H. P. Lovecraft writes:
THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.
This is from Lovecraft’s monograph Supernatural Horror In Literature, which is considered the seminal 20th century treatment on the subject. In it, he surveys many masters of the macabre in the centuries and decades up to his time.
I don’t agree with him that fear is the oldest or strongest emotion or that fear of the unknown in particular is. I think mankind came into this word (whether you buy evolutionary accounts or not) with a robust set of emotions, no one of which predominates the others.
That being said, fear is a powerful, primal emotion, and fear of the unknown is one of its major expressions.
That is a sufficient reason for horror stories being popular despite the efforts of those who would cramp literature down into just those forms of naive realism that would seek to uplift all readers into "smirking optimism." (Gotta love that phrase.)
God gave the human imagination dragons, whether as symbols of actual or fanciful evils, and as Lovecraft points out in his monograph, the weirdly horrible has haunted human literature since its dim beginnings in primitive folklore. It’s part of the human psyche, and nothing is going to change that.
One of my own theories is that we like such literature for the same reason that kittens and puppies wrestle with each other and that boys play mock combat games: It’s a way of preparing ourselves psychologically when we may have to face horrible dangers, a way of experiencing such situations in a safe way (think: holodeck with the safeties on) so that we will be psychologically prepared for them when we face terrible real-life situations with the safeties off. To prep us for these, we have an inbuilt drive that makes us want to "play" dangerous situations so that we have something to fall back on when we encounter them for real.
When we’re young, we physicalize this through play. When we’re older, we internalize it through literature. But it’s the same phenomenon.
We may never encounter in real life the specific dangers we read about in horror stories or thrillers. Cthulhu is, after all, fiction. But there are things in the world just as evil and–to us as individuals–just as deadly as Cthulhu.
Better to have some experience of such evils in a simulator than to face them cold.
… in the public-school system, that is:
"One day after jazz band practice, 14-year-old Peter Wilson’s band teacher pulled him aside.
"The instructor wanted to know whether Peter, who is home-schooled alongside his three brothers, liked being taught by his mother, and why he didn’t come to public school full-time, instead of just for music.
"The teacher seemed uncomfortable bringing it up, and the conversation was brief, Peter said. When he got home, he told his parents.
"Mark and Teckla Wilson, who are raising their four sons in Mark Wilson’s roomy childhood home in this former timber town, soon found out to their annoyance that the teacher’s questions were part of an effort by the Myrtle Point school district to persuade home-schooling families to give the public system a shot."
(Nod to Crowhill for the link.)
My sister was laying odds that I’d be either Violet or Elastigirl. She was wrong:
Which Incredibles Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
(Nod to the Two Sleepy Mommies for the link.)
My sister was laying odds that I’d be either Violet or Elastigirl. She was wrong:
Which Incredibles Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
(Nod to the Two Sleepy Mommies for the link.)
One M.D. has a novel solution to warnings of an impending physician shortage: Embrace the shortage and become, in her words, "a rare commodity":
"Why would anyone in their right mind want to go into medicine now? Until something is done to corral the HMO and government administrators (who are expensive and time-consuming annoyances); until the pay for family practice and general practice doctors is made equal to that of general pediatricians and general internists; until there are special courts for malpractice complaints instead of the current lawyer-stealing-from-doctor tort system; and until we aren’t having to cope daily with the tragic stories of people who cannot afford medications and of people who are being dumped off insurance when they are sick, I’m advising my bright young patients to look elsewhere for an occupation.
"I think we should be allowed to become a rare commodity. Maybe then we will be paid enough and respected enough to make the profession worth doing again" (source).
After my second spit-take at the line suggesting that doctors aren’t compensated enough in money and respect for their services, I got to thinking.
In some ways, I can see this physician’s point. Given their long years of expensive training, the malpractice coverage they must pay, and the risks entailed with running a business (especially one where they are beholden to insurance companies to cough up payments in a timely manner) the dazzling salaries doctors reportedly make do seem less-glittering. And, of course, it is specialization that pays the most. General practice and teaching doctors do not make dazzling salaries. I can also concede that respect for doctors flies out the window when it’s time to start looking around for a scapegoat for a tragedy, whether or not an individual doctor could have done anything differently.
Still.
Advising that physicians allow themselves to become a "rare commodity" will only mean that patients, those whom doctors are supposed to serve, will only receive worse care as the insurance companies ration out treatment options ever more thinly to meet the increased demand. And, as the physicians left in the field grow ever more gray, who will replace them? Will it take a decade-plus to train the new physicians once the potential doctors and early-retiree doctors decide to come back from their "strike"?
All in all, a silly proposal for a serious problem.
(Nod to Kevin, M.D., for the links.)
One M.D. has a novel solution to warnings of an impending physician shortage: Embrace the shortage and become, in her words, "a rare commodity":
"Why would anyone in their right mind want to go into medicine now? Until something is done to corral the HMO and government administrators (who are expensive and time-consuming annoyances); until the pay for family practice and general practice doctors is made equal to that of general pediatricians and general internists; until there are special courts for malpractice complaints instead of the current lawyer-stealing-from-doctor tort system; and until we aren’t having to cope daily with the tragic stories of people who cannot afford medications and of people who are being dumped off insurance when they are sick, I’m advising my bright young patients to look elsewhere for an occupation.
"I think we should be allowed to become a rare commodity. Maybe then we will be paid enough and respected enough to make the profession worth doing again" (source).
After my second spit-take at the line suggesting that doctors aren’t compensated enough in money and respect for their services, I got to thinking.
In some ways, I can see this physician’s point. Given their long years of expensive training, the malpractice coverage they must pay, and the risks entailed with running a business (especially one where they are beholden to insurance companies to cough up payments in a timely manner) the dazzling salaries doctors reportedly make do seem less-glittering. And, of course, it is specialization that pays the most. General practice and teaching doctors do not make dazzling salaries. I can also concede that respect for doctors flies out the window when it’s time to start looking around for a scapegoat for a tragedy, whether or not an individual doctor could have done anything differently.
Still.
Advising that physicians allow themselves to become a "rare commodity" will only mean that patients, those whom doctors are supposed to serve, will only receive worse care as the insurance companies ration out treatment options ever more thinly to meet the increased demand. And, as the physicians left in the field grow ever more gray, who will replace them? Will it take a decade-plus to train the new physicians once the potential doctors and early-retiree doctors decide to come back from their "strike"?
All in all, a silly proposal for a serious problem.
(Nod to Kevin, M.D., for the links.)