The Ultraviolet Garden

…a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him! —Twain, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

The house feels empty as hell without Lucky. We’ll always remember her sweetness. She came with her own sound effects. Sometimes she sounded like General Cornrow Wallace! She’d roll up on you like that.

Ptttttttdddddddddrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

That’s when she felt playful.

*sigh*

Onward.

I’ve been piddling around with wordpress themes. I’m using “LightWord” now.

I modified it slightly. I’m actually quite satisfied with it. It meets all of my requirements now. I still don’t understand why so many ppl place the comment section in the byline area.

In this case the theme didn’t even have a byline; it was easy enough to add.

I’ve also added a “like/dislike” plugin but only the comments are showing the rating. I need to figure out how to make it work on posts. If you use wordpress, maybe you’ll find these useful:

Like/Dislike Comment Rating worked for me.

Like/Dislike Post Rating didn’t work for me. I’ll figure it out eventually. Probably something minor.

I never know which plugins I’ll end up keeping. Usually I just play with things, if they are useful they’ll be kept. I liked “The Wall” plugin, but since it had to keep refreshing to load the most recent wall items it made my logs practically useless.

Although a simple filter would fix that problem. I’m just too lazy to do that. Maybe later.

Right now I’m working on the RWA Scale (see “Altemeyer’s Authoritarians“). I can’t use his questions. But if I come up with my own questions it should be fine. Check out his book if you haven’t. (It’s free. Also he prefers that ppl be introduced to his RWA Scale via the book. In this way, they learn that it may—or may not—be useful for individuals; it’s more geared toward getting average trends in groups of persons.)

When he asked me to remove the RWA survey, of course I complied. Nothing to do with copyright it’s just general courtesy. But, as his own survey predicted in my case, I have my own opinion on this.

Given that, do I even really need to take the survey myself? (Of course, I did. I scored very low, obviously.)

I’m also interested in doing an equivalent of the Social Dominance Scale as well. I can’t use his exact questions, but again you can’t copyright an idea, only the expression of it. And as long as I’m not using his questions, I should be okay. I’ve actually got a good idea about this but we’ll see. What I’d like to do is use actual things authoritarians or their followers have said—quotations, in other words—as the items on the survey. Looking at many of these, I could easily come up with quotations from “The Georges”. (Of the Bush persuasion, of course.)

There’s not exactly a shortage of folks who are quotable in this respect.

Have a good day all.

…of that silly Baldwin brother.

More from me later. Thanks Mary for posting the vid!

I’m still trying to adjust to the knowledge that, yes, Californians are this dumb after all. More from me on this later.

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!’

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

‘And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.

Postscript. Hannah… Thanks for alerting me to that vid! xoxoxox

Give a man a reputation as an early riser and that man can sleep till noon. —Mark Twain

Mother Teresa, AKA Hell’s Angel or The Ghoul of Calcutta:

The Catholic version of Ed Gein.

I wonder if she masturbated.

—

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Ted Turner interviews Carl Sagan.

Highlights… Sagan talks about nuclear winter, war, rich ppl, extraterrestrial life, time travel, etc.

At the time of this interview, we were #19 in infant mortality. So, eighteen other countries care about their babies more than we do.

O I know we like to yammer on about how much we Americans love our kids, but mostly it’s hot air. Because if we truly did, we would put our money where our gigantic American mouths are.

I’ve never seen anyone yammer on so much as we, about something they purportedly care about so god damn much, only to turn around and disprove with their actions everything that just came out of their mouths.

One thing I liked about this interview is the wording Sagan used when talking about our failure as a society to take care of our own… he said we “chose” to have homeless ppl. And yeah, we did and do.

Do we really want another nutcake leader who bans books and makes public policy based on their personal religion? I want to know the exact same things that Damon wants to know… but as I’ve told ppl before, after having been in Alaska myself, I’ve seen firsthand how much religion is revered there. I personally believe that the reason why this is so, is that so many ppl are so very isolated there. Their minds are provincialized.

It reminds me of that religious bigot Deborah Morse at Juneau-Douglas High School, which resulted in Morse v. Frederick.

We lost.

Can omniscient god, who
knows the future, find
the omnipotence to
change his future mind?
—Karen Owens