When confronted by an issue that needs resolving, you parents likely told you that there are appropriate responses and responses that are not so good. The difference is usually dependent upon what part of your brain you use, or even if you are using your brain at all. For example, if you have a child that exhibits bad behavior, you need to demonstrate why that behavior is bad and then show that there are consequences. If you use the part of your brain where you feel sorry for them, you can present a bad example by rewarding the bad behavior in the guise of ‘bailing them out’ and presenting no consequences. Similarly, if you find a bullet in your yard, you can use the rational side of the brain and get it to law enforcement, or you can use the juvenile part of your brain and decide to smash it with a hammer and get a bullet in the gut.

Over the Christmas break, I received the latest and greatest "Geek Toy," the iPhone. I have spent a considerable amount of time getting the phone part set up, learning how to cruise the web, making ring-tones and hours and hours of MaJong. It is a marvelous piece of engineering. The data age is really here, and I suppose that future versions will have holographic projections and the ability to wash dishes.

Of course, one of the marvelous and most useful things about it is the ability to receive and send emails from any location. Getting the emails is easy, and throwing the spam out is as easy as it would be on any software. Here, though, is where I have a lot of trouble with the iPhone. There is this little 'touch-screen' keyboard that pops up whenever you wish to actually send an email, because, presumably, you may actually want to have some "content" in the emails that you send. I can get content in there, but it is not english.

Hello friends and neighbors. I have a pop-quiz for you:

Who among us now, when seeing yet another political ad pop up on the old television screen, does not immediately begin looking for the mute button faster than Congress can spend a dollar?

I would be very surprised if there are even 1% of us normal citizens that sit in awe and wonder at another mud-slinging, name-calling, finger-pointing hodge-podge of politically mindless drivel. I would also be amazed if there is anything, including light, which can spend money faster than Congress. We are in yet another season of the political beat-down. As a result of having been through a few of these, I have a couple of observations.

If this was on another site other than our friends over at Discovery, I would say it was a hoax:

“Trapped inside a Lebanese weevil covered in ancient Burmese amber, a tiny colony of bacteria and yeast has lain dormant for up to 45 million years. A decade ago Raul Cano, now a scientist at the California Polytechnic State University, drilled a tiny hole into the amber and extracted more than 2,000 different kinds of microscopic creatures.”

Wow. THAT is science that works. It is amazing enough that the “Jurassic Park” style of getting the yeast actually worked, but in a truly American spirit, the guy decides to make beer out of it. You just have to love that.

Hello friends and neighbors! Yes, it has been a while since your friend and lifeline to the strange has posted, but I have had other issues in my life than putting out blogs of late. So, all three of my loyal readers can now sit back and rejoice that I have returned to my peanut-butter crusted keypad to hammer out some more nonsense for your approval and enlightenment.

Two articles have caught my attention today. Yes, that is two….more than one and less than three. You all thought I could not read that much in one week did you? Fie on you, of course I can, with the help of a secretary and my tattered copy of Webster’s Dictionary.

These two articles pertain to some of my favorite things; women’s unmentionable under-things, earthquakes, and frogs.

When I was a rug-rat growing up in the windy plains of the Texas panhandle, one of our principle joys as kids was to go to my grandfather’s drive-in theater, watch the parents set up the window speaker, sit through the cartoons, and then, when the actual movie started, jump out of the car and run up to the projection booth. There were several reasons that we did this. The best and fore-most reason was that my Grandfather made the best chili pie in the entire south. He would cook this chili con carne dish of his forever, and when we showed up in the booth, he would slit open a small bag of Fritos and top it off with his chili, and I could literally eat my weight in this stuff. When he thought I was about to be just too full, why, he would send me back to my parent’s car with a box of candy and let my parents worry about the results.

This was in the 60’s, and this was way out in the country, so the best of the best movies we did not get to see for a while after they had been officially released, but, oh my, there were some movies that could take even a kid’s attention away from the chili pie, cotton candy and milk-duds.

It was there that I saw Raquel Welch in her fur bikini in “One Million Years BC”. Granted, I did not appreciate her fur bikini as much as I did the stop-action monsters until I was older, but I still have a clear memory of that movie. “Creature from the Black Lagoon” was another that made me pause from forcing chili pie down my throat long enough to be scared of the guy in the green wet-suit. I could list several others that made their way into my twisted psyche, but few could compare to “Planet of the Apes.” Charlton Heston, in his leather rags, talking to an ape with the voice of Roddy McDowall, just about made my little brain flat-line. Who would have guessed that intelligent apes would have a pronounced English accent? My kids today think that the special effects came from an Xbox 360 at the best, but at the time, it did not matter as much that their mouths did not move naturally. I loved that movie, and I still do, even though my tastes are not quite as innocent as they are now. I just knew than, and I am certain now, that apes of the non-homo species would someday start acquiring the habits of the modern Homo-sapiens. After all, even as a kid I knew people that were far less sophisticated than Dr. Zaius.

"Come give Daddy some sugar...."

Now we have proof of these phenomena.

As was his habit every afternoon in the sleepy little hamlet of Bloogerville, Little Billy was down by the pond. With the amber sun setting gently down in the shady vale, casting its light into soft hues that reflected off the mirror surface of the small pond, Billy sat on the shore contemplating the things he had brought. He had managed to get there with his cane pole, some worms, a hook, some line, something that used to be a sandwich in his back pocket, and a 50 gallon drum of confusion.

After some number of days of experimenting, Billy had managed to figure out that somehow the line AND the hook needed to be attached to the pole, but the exact order and sequence of these events was as uncertain to Billy as Shakespeare would be to his dog, and they both read at the same grade level. After some trial and error and a few painful hook extractions, Billy was pretty sure that the worm had to come next, but exactly how THAT was supposed to work was becoming frustrating. It seems that no matter how much Billy tried, he could not convince the worms to hang on to the hook.

"C'mon, yer dagummed dummy wurms!" He murmured between his teeth, which is how people murmur, unless they do not have teeth, like Billy's Uncle Tummy. "How do ya get anywhere's or hang onta anything when ya ain't gots no derned hands?"

Recently a gathering of Islamic leaders in Dakar, Senegal, has brought together leaders from many countries to discuss what they described as "Islamophobia." Included in this gathering were respectable leaders from Muslim countries, a handful of despotic maniacs, and a complete desire to ignore basic human freedoms.

Is it possible that there can be no understanding between the east and the west? I, personally, do not think so, but we in the west are not the only people that have to make changes to make that possible. According to our friends in the AP:

Concerned about what they see as a rise in the defamation of Islam, leaders of the world's Muslim nations are considering taking legal action against those that slight their religion or its sacred symbols. It was a key issue during a two-day summit that ended Friday in this western Africa capital.

The University
Of South Florida College Of Public Health
has brought a new study to our attention here at Sciolist Salmagundi. It
reflects our own unpublished study (even though our manager, Sal, showed up at
the publishing house with a can of gasoline and threatened to “burn this damned
place to the ground”) called “Idiots and Why Red light Cameras are the Spawn of
Satan.”

Typical Driver

Suck it Eagles! ... this is how it should be done.

I don't tend to put songs up back to back like this but a technical issue required a couple of tests of the system. Once this great Gipsy Kings song was up it just seemed a shame to take it down. Enjoy all the flamenco goodness of the kings.