Hope you guys have a good Memorial Day. My self, I’m off to get out of Austin for the day for a little r&r.
Archive for May, 2004
Work on the Survivor Site
Show off the “I love midget Porn” t-shirt
Go to San Antonio two days in a row, one for pleasure, one for business.
Finish “backing up” my netflix dvds.
Clean up the computer hutch (evil Dave is moving in)
move my computer to my room
Finish the book Choke by Chuck Palahniuk.
See the movie Troy
See the movie Day after Tomorrow
Purchase a fully automatic weapon
Purchase a trench coat
Purchase Catcher in the Rye.
Call the boss and make sure he’ll be at work on Tuesday…
Ok ok, check out the t-shirt here.
To quote pylorns, “In the continuing tradition here at Wetwired, we feature women of the movies that we find attractive.” Exercising my Title IX rights, I am pointing out men that the women who visit Wetwired can talk about. This edition we’ll talk about the Godfather. The core characteristics remain the same; they are sexy, violent men struggling against the powers that be to protect their family honor. Their stories are full of the rituals of heterosexuality performed with glamour and passion (weddings, family feasts, straight sex). Their muscles flex to grapple with, and glory in, organized crime, the Catholic church and l’ordine della famiglia: a highly controlled and controlling hierarchical patriarchal family system. There is something inherently magnetic about a powerful mafia figure. He may not even be that physically attractive, such as Tony Soprano. He eats like a pig and acts like an ass, but he has his moments when he pulls us in. Men want to be him; women want to be with him.
So my morning bout on the computer I browsed some sites on blogger, updated my blogger profile and came across some blogs of note.
First off there is True Porn Clerk Stories. Something that amazes me, You know that this stuff is out there but you never think to look…
And then there is this one.. My Secret Life. Another quite interesting site.
Emily announced the winners of the WIN A BLOG contest. Why do I mention this? Because yours truly judged the entries and I have to say that some of them were awsome. I mean purely great writing. Anyway it was annonymous so I don’t know which is which. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough.
Simon is a double agent. It’s really a question of which government he’s not in bed with now isn’t it Simon?
Helen asks that we not be critical of her and Mr. Y on her blog. I never have been other than to offer advice, but really if you don’t want people to comment then close down the comments all together. You have to take the bad with the good when you aire your life with the world. There are those of us who are very considerate like myself, and evil Jim. And there are those who aren’t.
Ace of Spades has one of the funniest articles I’ve read in a while, most notably the “Nasty Adolf.” A term which I submitted to Urban Dictionary and should be available for your viewing pleasure very shortly. I’ve linked to it but it may not be there yet.
Mike the Marine is awaiting a new laptop.
And Jen talks about bras. Do men like them lacy or not?
Saturday, May 22nd, Lt. Vicky Wax of the Baton Rouge police force was shot and killed in the line of duty while working security at the Perkins road Wal-Mart. She was a fine officer, a loving woman, and a good friend of mine.
Mrs. Vicky and I met while she was working extra duty security for a bar that I worked at. She was about 50 years old, weighed less than 100 lbs, and on more than one occasion I saw her bounce someone at least three times her size. To describe her as tough, would be a pleasant little understatement that would conflict drastically with her personality. She was kind and gentle, and I can think of no one she wasn
Many of you might be goign to check out The Day After Tomorrow over the Memorial Day weekend. It looks like a pretty good mind numbing flick right? Kind of like Independence Day, a movie that isn’t going to win an Oscar but is a good action packed flic that keeps you busy for 2 hours or so and you come out saying, “That was a good movie.” Now a lot of people have asked me could this really happen. The answer is yes. But not like you think. Are we overdue for another Iceage? Yes, but we are overdue in geologic terms. These things don’t happen over night. Geologically an iceage takes thousands of years to move and have an effect. But there are some new theories on how quick the weather actually did change.
There have been several ice ages in the history of the Earth. What is commonly called the ice age is actually the most recent (Quaternary) which began about two million years ago, and was characterized by cold (glacial), and relatively warm (interglacial) phases.
Four major continental glaciations are recorded in North America. The last (Wisconsin) began about 70,000 years ago, and ended 10,000 years ago.
The previous iceage theory from the core samples they have taken and the way the weather patterns looked went like this:
Most scientists figured the transition time from icy to warm was gradual, lasting dozens to hundreds of years, and nobody was sure exactly what had caused it. (Variations in solar radiation were suspected, as were volcanic activity, along with early theories about the Great Conveyor Belt, which, until recently, was a poorly understood phenomenon.)
Looking at the ice cores, however, scientists were shocked to discover that the transitions from ice age-like weather to contemporary-type weather usually took only two or three years. Something was flipping the weather of the planet back and forth with a rapidity that was startling.
It turns out that the ice age versus temperate weather patterns weren’t part of a smooth and linear process, like a dimmer slider for an overhead light bulb. They are part of a delicately balanced teeter-totter, which can exist in one state or the other, but transits through the middle stage almost overnight. They more resemble a light switch, which is off as you gradually and slowly lift it, until it hits a mid-point threshold or “breakover point” where suddenly the state is flipped from off to on and the light comes on.
It appears that small (less that .1 percent) variations in solar energy happen in roughly 1500-year cycles. This cycle, for example, is what brought us the “Little Ice Age” that started around the year 1400 and dramatically cooled North America and Europe (we’re now in the warming phase, recovering from that). When the ice in the Arctic Ocean is frozen solid and locked up, and the glaciers on Greenland are relatively stable, this variation warms and cools the Earth in a very small way, but doesn’t affect the operation of the Great Conveyor Belt that brings moderating warm water into the North Atlantic.
In millennia past, however, before the Arctic totally froze and locked up, and before some critical threshold amount of fresh water was locked up in the Greenland and other glaciers, these 1500-year variations in solar energy didn’t just slightly warm up or cool down the weather for the landmasses bracketing the North Atlantic. They flipped on and off periods of total glaciation and periods of temperate weather.
And these changes came suddenly.
For early humans living in Europe 30,000 years ago - when the cave paintings in France were produced - the weather would be pretty much like it is today for well over a thousand years, giving people a chance to build culture to the point where they could produce art and reach across large territories.
And then a particularly hard winter would hit.
The spring would come late, and summer would never seem to really arrive, with the winter snows appearing as early as September. The next winter would be brutally cold, and the next spring didn’t happen at all, with above-freezing temperatures only being reached for a few days during August and the snow never completely melting. After that, the summer never returned: for 1500 years the snow simply accumulated and accumulated, deeper and deeper, as the continent came to be covered with glaciers and humans either fled or died out. (Neanderthals, who dominated Europe until the end of these cycles, appear to have been better adapted to cold weather than Homo sapiens.)
What brought on this sudden “disappearance of summer” period was that the warm-water currents of the Great Conveyor Belt had shut down. Once the Gulf Stream was no longer flowing, it only took a year or three for the last of the residual heat held in the North Atlantic Ocean to dissipate into the air over Europe, and then there was no more warmth to moderate the northern latitudes. When the summer stopped in the north, the rains stopped around the equator: At the same time Europe was plunged into an Ice Age, the Middle East and Africa were ravaged by drought and wind-driven firestorms. .
Most scientists involved in research on this topic agree that the culprit is global warming, melting the icebergs on Greenland and the Arctic icepack and thus flushing cold, fresh water down into the Greenland Sea from the north. When a critical threshold is reached, the climate will suddenly switch to an ice age that could last minimally 700 or so years, and maximally over 100,000 years.
And when might that threshold be reached? Nobody knows - the action of the Great Conveyor Belt in defining ice ages was discovered only in the last decade. Preliminary computer models and scientists willing to speculate suggest the switch could flip as early as next year, or it may be generations from now. It may be wobbling right now, producing the extremes of weather we’ve seen in the past few years.
What’s almost certain is that if nothing is done about global warming, it will happen sooner rather than later.
Now I do agree that global warming may have some of the cause as a catalyst, but I don’t agree that we humans are having as much of an effect on it than our media and scientists might has us belive. I attended a seminar on Global warming in which two sides debated the issue and I was impressed on both sides. It turns out that our ozone layers are the weakest at the winter times and not the summer times.
In the continuing tradition here at wetwired, we feature women of the movies that we find attractive. This edition we’ll talk about Helena Bonham Carter. Recently she’s been in the movie ‘Big Fish’ and ‘Planet of the Apes’. Currently she is filming Wallace & Gromit Movie: Curse of the Wererabbit, which is due out in 2005.
Bio
Helena Bonham Carter was born in Golders Green, London on May 26, 1966, the third child of Raymond and Elena Bonham Carter. Although Helena was born into a family of aristocrats, politicians and filmmakers, including her great grandfather, H.H. Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908-1916 and great uncle Anthony Asquith, a famous director, Helena’s life wasn’t perfect. Her mother, Elena, suffered a nervous breakdown when Helena was 5 years old, which eventually led Elena to pursue a career as a psychotherapist, whom Helena would later pay to read her scripts. Eight years later, Helena’s father, Raymond, a merchant banker, was left partially paralyzed from a botched surgery following a stroke. Helena helped her mother take care of her father and would continue to live with her parents well into her 20s.
After a 5 year relationship with Kenneth Branagh in the 1990s and a short-lived fling with Steve Martin, Helena is currently romantically linked with her Planet of the Apes director, Tim Burton.
Career
While attending South Hampstead School For Girls, Helena used the proceeds from a poetry competition to buy space in a casting directory, and meanwhile began acting onstage. Her first real role was as an Edwardian ghost in the Channel 4 production, A Pattern of Roses. She landed her first movie role, as the title character in Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane, at the age of 18 and followed it immediately with a turn in the Merchant/Ivory film, A Room with a View which would launch her career, and unfortunately type-cast her in period roles for the next 8 years.
She took whatever uncorseted roles came her way, but it wasn’t until her back to back turns in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite and Margaret’s Museum in 1995 that she could return to period roles in Twelfth Night and the much acclaimed The Wings of the Dove without further fear of type-casting. Her diverse roles in films like The Theory of Flight and Fight Club have further cemented her image as a versatile actress.
source:http://helena.chonomai.com .
Ok, I’ve created a new Link page. I used to have a huge assortment of links to different sites but my forum crashed so I lost those. Anyway if you were linked, just shoot me an email and I’ll add you again. If you were not linked and want to be, shoot me an email and I’ll link you. I have also fixed the contact page. Wow - there was a fix 6 months in the making. You’d think I’d never get around to it.
Jim realized we had disappeared at one point a couple months ago. Actually we disappeared for a week while I was sorting out ownership information and host information for the site. I’ve had this site for a little over 4 years now. It’s been a short 4 years and damn near life changing events have happened. I was in college, then engaged, then moved to Austin, then single again. And now.. well still single.. and no longer at Computer company X; I’m at Software Company X.
Now when I assess what has changed, it seems like a whirlwind of changes all from one slight decision to move away from almost all of my friends, my school and my folks to take one opportunity. If I could go back and do it a second time I don’t think I’d change a thing.
BTW, have you linked to this site? If you have let me know. I am compiling a new list of blogs I frequent. Somewhere along the line when I updated the wetwired forum, I lost my links page, so now I am going to update it with the latest and greatest.
http://www.gasbuddy.com/ Looking to find the cheapest gas stations in your area? Check this link out. Check out the link on the bottom of the page under all the menus and it’ll show Austin’s cheapest gas prices.
They are really starting to bother me. I drive a car where I have to put premium in otherwise my sports car will start knocking. So I am bent over at the pump. I am also bothered by the fact that our government is pressing OPEC to increase oil production and lower the prices per barrel. It will only help a little bit, the demand will still be there. OPEC is right in some cases. They say that them increasing production won’t bring the price of gasoline down much in this country.
Want to know why? We haven’t built a new oil refinery in this country in 25 years due to environmental concerns. What our government hasn’t really told you either is that all major oil refineries are also having to implement additional units to refine out additional sulfates from gasoline. The refineries are merely doing this to meet the new government standards imposed on them. The cost to do this is passed onto the consumer. It is these two reasons that our prices are high, not so much OPEC. Sure it might have some effect, but not enough. The only real solution is an extension on how long it will take to implement those new units, and building additional refineries to meet the 35% increase in demand in oil.
A time to wash the car, do laundry, catch up on all that you couldn’t do over the week. Thank god for weekends. Luckily for me I have a 3-day weekend too. So after some examining between the original writing and the new writing of the Washintoniene - the new one is a farce. Someone with lesser writting skills and who adds in some really far fetched stories.
Check out the survivor site, it’s been redesigned, and looking for players and help.
This lass, has some damn intersting insight when it comes to the Hill. We’ll just say that certain people fund her lavish lifestyle. Ah, how it must be nice to be an intern.
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