Enoch

Is there a PC demo yet?

In honor of the passing of the legendary Max Roach, I'm listening to Sonny Rollins' "Blue Seven," which features an amazing drum solo by Roach. It's over 2 minutes long, and it's almost disappointing when Sonny comes back in at the end of it.

Tom Waits - In the Neighborhood.

Good luck! I'd also recommend getting the expansions eventually, but it's probably best to get familiar with the core game before adding all the extra features. Plus, the latest patch for the basic game includes most of the AI improvements from the expansions. And Civ Fanatics is a very useful resource. Check their "War Academy" for tips on getting started.

This:

Nope. Northern Virginia. You have to catch it right because the season here is a tad shorter, but if you do, you can still get a damn fine peach. Today I'm going to a meeting a big, scary building with an unusual number of sides.

I just ate a perfectly ripe, locally grown, fresh peach. It is easily the best thing I've tasted in months. I need to get up on Saturday and go to the farmer's market they have each week in the courthouse parking lot to see if I can buy any more.

But being an immigrant makes it pretty darn certain that you're non-white. The racism stuff, though, is a distraction. Yes, there are lots of racists (both of the closeted and overt variety) in the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. But it's not fair to tar all of those opposed to immigration with that brush, and supporters of pro-immigrant policies demean themselves when they argue with insults rather than facts. There are lots of reasons beyond racism that people get excited and work to oppose immigration. (I think these reasons are either wrong or outweighed by other positives they're not considering, but that's another matter.)

You can call me a honkey. Hell, now that I'm a reasonably well-paid white-collar government worker, I'm essentially "the man." Speaking of which, I am currently working on my self-assessment for my 1-year performance review at my job. I hate this kind of stuff. Yeah, it is better that it is required (the alternative would have the squeaky wheel getting all the grease-- i.e., the people who are so ambitious/egotistical to ask for a raise every few months), but I just can't help but feeling as if I'm bragging while filling the thing out, and sounding boastful really grates on me.

Civ4 Warlords. The mighty Carthaginian Empire.

Perhaps. I guess I don't see this case as particularly "juicy." RC corruption is already a pretty attractive story for a journalist to pursue, whether they're in the middle of litigation or not. I don't know that an IP dispute with a big company increases the visibility of an organization as famous as the RC very much. Although you never know the kind of lurid details that could pop up in discovery...

It is true that reputation is more important to the RC than it is to J&J, and I agree that the effect of the suit on J&J sales will almost certainly be negligible. But in this case, I don't think that the facts do much to impugn the RC's reputation. The allegation is that the RC is selling stuff using their logo (with the profits going to fund RC charitable activities & overhead), which J&J argues is beyond the scope of the license that J&J gave the RC a century ago. Even if J&J is right on all counts and the judge laughs all of the RC's defenses out of court, I doubt that these facts will cause any current or potential donor to pause before signing a check to the RC. It's a business matter about a really old trademark license-- it's nowhere close to molesting children or buying Bentleys for their executives.

Paul Desmond & Gerry Mulligan -- Blight of the Fumble Bee. That's some damn fine jazz for two white boys. I'm usually not too into the "cool" west coast sound, but Mulligan is an amazing player and a very good composer (he wrote or arranged many of the tracks on Miles' Birth of the Cool). Plus the tone he gets out of his baritone sax is really distinctive, and it blends well with Desmond's trademark breathy, round sound. (Desmond is best known as Dave Brubeck's saxophonist; if you're familiar with the original recording of "Take Five," you know what he sounds like.) There's also no chordal instrument in the combo (Bass, Drums, and the 2 Saxes), so the two horns fill the holes in each others solos with some great improvised counterpoint. That's hard stuff to do, and both of these guys were masters.

That's a ridiculous argument. If the entire human race worked as hard as it could with the explicit goal of actually destroying the Earth, it would still be the most habitable rock in the solar system. Humans do a lot better in a Nitrogen-Oxygen atmosphere with pollution/radiation/no ozone layer/whatever than they do in a Methane atmosphere (or no atmosphere at all). The only rational reasons to keep funding space exploration/colonization are pure scientific research and bragging rights.

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I'm beginning to think that this thread is an homage to the untimely demise of the Weekly World News.

It's statistically impossible to say what is statistically impossible when our sample size is 1. Sure, the one planet we know of that supports life saw it evolve to the point of intelligence, but that doesn't give us any information as to either how unusual the existence of life is or how frequently life evolves to the point of human-level intelligence. Any cover-up of the scale imagined by most UFO enthusiasts is simply beyond the capabilities of the U.S. government.

You know, I lived about 5 miles away from the VA location for 3 years and didn't go there once. This probably has something to do with those 3 years being the time I spent attending law school, which has the general effect of draining one's capacity to experience joy. (Also, the few classmates that I didn't loathe weren't really the type who enjoy rollercoasters and $5 coca-colas.)

With all this Civ talk, I may have to pick up the new expansion. Also, I was in Philly this past week, and I saw the exhibit of artifacts from Tutankhamun's tomb at the Franklin Institute-- all that ancient cultures stuff always gets me thinking Civ. Maybe I'll try starting a game with Warlords first and see how I enjoy it. If it turns into one of those games where I play for 8 hours only to discover that there's no f#@&ing coal anywhere on my home continent, I'll probably just get frustrated and pass. I'll have to tone down the difficulty, though. I'm a bit rusty to jump right in where I used to play, which I believe was the "Monarch" level. (At that level, if I was picky about starting locations, I had about a 50% success rate; "success" being defined as having my empire among the leaders in most categories at around the early industrial age when I usually got bored and started over.)

I'm not much of an amusement park person. I grew up about 40 minute drive away from the Six Flags in NJ, and I'd go every once in awhile along with some activity/group I was a member of. The amount of fun I had was always a result of how much I enjoyed being with the people I went with, rather than any of the park's activities. There were a couple of rides that were not to be missed (old-style wooden rollercoasters FTW!!), but they weren't worth actually paying the cost of admission. I've been to a Sea World only once, when I was six. I don't really understand why anyone would want to combine a theme park with an aquarium.

Salt Peanuts, as performed by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach, live at Massey Hall in Toronto, 1953.

I found the part where you said "Oh, how I'll love you" as a comment on my profile. I thought you were threatening me. To stay on topic, I am (appropriately) listening to: Pixies -- La La Love You

The full-choir, a cappella version of the "Theme to Spider-Pig" was really good. Hypnotic.

Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers -- New England (live in Old England)

R.E.M. - I Remember California.