 |
|
|
|
Disks in Rotation: Books Lying
Open What's For Lunch? Soul-Devouring
Worry When I Grow Up:
|
Saturday May 4, 2002 |
| Quote
of the Day If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man. -- Mark Twain |
|
Daily
Blog Well, one thing. People are insane, at times. Adults get these problems with anger issues when the kids are involved, and like they'll go insane on total strangers in a second, if the alternative is to discipline or control their child, or just wait their turn. Guy tonight was over in the middle of a row, and said he wanted 1 item (I was selling cotton candy, AKA fairy floss in certain convict-spawned countries.) when I had 3 left. As he dug for his money (no one EVER has their money ready to speed things up) other people approached me and wanted to buy my poison. I'd already passed the one over to the first guy, so I sold the last 2 I had on that board and could have sold 4 or 5 more right then. That always happens, BTW. The customers work in secret teams, and if you have 5 left no one buys one. But when you have 3 left, you always get like 7 people who want, who must have, who demand you sell to them! I'm not sure how they arrange that, but they do it almost every time. I figure it's some sort of ballpark customer ability, like how fish in a school all swerve the same direction at the same time. Anyway, the guy who wanted one gets it, and passes over a $20. So I make change and pass it back, and as it gets near him he goes, "I wanted 3." I say, "Sorry, you said 1 and I sold the rest." Which he could easily see while I was doing it, since I made sure he only wanted one, and he saw my finger and nodded when I said $2.25 was the price. He suddenly starts to yell how he wants 3, and how he's not buying just one, etc. He's maybe a dozen people over, in a totally full section, so easily 100 people are within a 15 foot radius, and probably 300 can hear him yelling, since it's between innings and there's no (other) crowd noise. Some guy near him goes, "I think you said 1, Bob." Not surprisingly, Bob begs to differ, stands up and starts shouting. "You goddamn motherfucker! I said 3! Fuck!" Yelling at me, not the other guy. And he grabs the cotton candy from the kid next to him, and hurls it at me. Which is never a good idea, since they weigh like 2 ounces and are large and un-aerodynamic. It's like throwing a tissue. It goes about 5 feet, or approximately 2 feet from the end of his arm, and partially disintegrates in the process, since they aren't exactly built for speed. Given my recent issues at work, AKA being fired, I would probably have given the idiot his money back and taken the mangled CC with me, but his wife or mistress or something calms him down, after he screams a few more times. Now you'll note that this is in front of his kid(s), and about 200 total strangers, and he's screaming and throwing (literally) a tantrum over not being able to buy as many cotton candies as he wants, when I'm saying sorry and that I'll be back in 3 minutes with a full load. That sort of thing happens at least once a game, on average. And 95% of the time it's a man (of course) and he's freaking out because of his kids, or because he can't buy enough for his kids, or because he'll never get an erection again and can't have any more kids, or something. No one ever gets angry buying peanuts or water or ice cream, things I sell sometimes. It's always a dad about something to do with his kids. Just one more reason men shouldn't be allowed near children, IMHO. On with the news. • New study says that people who DL a lot of music on the internet actually increase their music purchases. Which is of course directly opposite to what the music industry claims as they shut down Napster and try to shut down the various Napster imitators. • Michael Jackson, as he looks today. Don't click this if you're easily grossed out. I'm serious, he's just so wrong. • The French elections are coming up, and their system has a variety of run offs, from which one person emerges to run against the current PM. In this case there was a huge upset and a guy who is basically a neo-Nazi, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was the winner. He's now challenging President Jacques Chirac, and all polls are showing Chirac at 75% or more of the vote. Chirac has gotten lucky, since he wasn't popular, but with a fanatic as the only other option, people have no real choice. Sort of like Gore would have done in the US last time if Buchanon or Keyes had been the republican candidate. Le Pen has been a nut his whole career, and you can find numerous articles about things he said previously. He's been racist, anti-semitic, sexist, you name it. As the French like to think of themselves as very progressive and liberal and such, he's amazingly out of step with the popular culture of the nation. During the election he's been very restrained, not spouting his typically inflammatory remarks, at least not until now. He's now claiming that there will be massive election fraud, which is of course the last result of the loser. Seldom do they do it in advance though. And in a week when he loses he can claim it was the Jews and Communists and Muslims that defeated him, which is just what his followers want to hear. Then again, letting the public pick their leaders isn't always such a good idea, as this article shows.
• It seems that daily there is some article about a school suspending or expelling a kid for something totally absurd. Taking aspirin or having a butter knife in the back of their pick up truck. Here's another one, a girl draws a doodle of a teacher with an arrow through her head, and gets suspended. Guess they aren't Steve Martin fans. • Funny news here and here about the US sailors in Australia, on the way home from duty in Afghanistan, wearing out the whores in Perth.
Funny that last bit, about not being up to the job. They must have a lot better whores in Oz, if there is anything to be "up for". I figured they just laid there until you were done, and maybe did some fake moaning if you requested it ($20 extra for moanie-moanie, Sailor-Boy). • They got a pic of Britney smoking. And verily was the earth plunged into the fires of perdition, and day became as night, the sun forever lost behind black clouds, weighted with a boiling rain of blood and excrement, and woe was unto mankind. |
|
|
I'd heard of her in the past, briefly, but the full article is an incredible read, and her website has a ton of interesting stuff also. This long article she's written about visual thinking, a common characteristic of how Autistic brains work, is just fascinating. They don't see think of things in words or concepts, but in pictures, and seem to have amazing abilities to replay past events in their heads, almost like human VCRs. Many have photographic memories, of a sort, and Dr. Grandin discusses this in her own head.
She's able to do this and come back to the topic at hand, and stay on course, while other less functional autistics just get caught up in the association and are lost to the present for some time. She worked as a consultant with Dustin Hoffman on Rain Man, helping him to see how to act realistically, and obviously did a good job, as he won the Academy Award for the role in 1989. The article mentioned above is excellent; in a nutshell it's about how she designs slaughterhouses and educates the workers to be non-stressful to the animals, so they go peacefully to their deaths. She's able to see things from the PoV of the animals, and describes numerous ways she's come up with innovations, most of them seeming like common sense in hindsight, that cut down on problems in the slaughtering, making it non-frightening for animals and less work for the humans and machinery. The whole ethical aspect of that is unavoidable, for me, though it's not touched upon in the article. I'd imagine PETA or others who oppose meat-consumption or using animals as products would be very ambivalent about her. She's helping make life more comfortable for animals, true, but at the same time it's making them more comfortable to die. For an extreme analogy, would we celebrate some Nazi who found more humane ways to slaughter the Jews during the holocaust? One the one hand, the animals are going to die anyway, so might as well make their death's as comfortable as possible. But on the other, how can you devote effort and kindness and clever design to a death camp? I'd imagine hardcore animal rights types would almost prefer the animals were treated horribly, as it would give them more ammunition to criticize the slaughter they so very much oppose. If the general public knows that the animals are dying peacefully, then they're more able to ignore thinking about the whole issue of killing them in the first place. Anyway, it's probably best if you don't think about that aspect of things too much, and just read about her life and how her mind works. It's quite fascinating, how she has to visualize things, how she's overcoming the limitations of her Autism, and how her mind being odd like that gives her amazing abilities normal humans simply do not possess. She's got a mind like a really powerful 3d graphics program. She can see something, and then form it into a 3d image in her head and rotate it, see it from all sides, move her mind's eye through it, etc. That's how she can envision her blueprints for the slaughterhouses, and see what the animals will be calm with, and improve upon the existing (and generally poor) designs. I'd think she could be designing things that are more beneficial than better ways to kill cows, but wait, I said not to think about that. Sorry. |
|
|
<-- Yesterday -- Daily Main Page -- Tomorrow --> |
|
All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
