I killed a deer last night with the mini-van. It did no damage to the van, but the deer was totaled. It seemed like a very small deer, likely a fawn from this spring, although I didn’t see any spots. It was still twitching when I got out of the van to check things out. I hate to see any animal suffer, but couldn’t humanely do much about it with the tools at hand. It was huge suprise to me when the deer essentially decided to run headlong into my passenger side bumper.

Usually when i have a very stressful day a little bit of raw fish will calm me right down.

IT”S NOT WORKING!!!!

Author of this quote wasn’t given, but referenced by b^2.

Further googling finds reference to this phrase on this page, this page, and this page. Based on what I see, I will attribute this quote to graphic designer/artist Nick Philip.

Reminds me a previous David Weinberger quote I blogged about.

Can anyone explain why I would buy an HP iPod? It has the same specs and the same price as the Apple one, as far as I can tell. At least when Sony created a Palm it was different. It had a different price, different shape and a different configuration. This is HP innovation? I can’t make heads or tails of this HP product. At least it doesn’t use ink that costs hundreds of dollars a gallon. It’s not even as innovative as a clone. I can’t even tell from the pictures if it’s been re-badged in a meaningful way. I don’t get it.

The incidence of comment span seems to be on the rise. I get so few comments, that am very happy to get notification that a comment has been scribbled on my web page. But happiness gives rise to disappointment, when I discover someone hawking prescription drugs or pr0n. Everyday lately, I have to delete 10-20 spam comments. While it’s very easy work to delete the spammy comments with the MT-Blacklist plug-in, it’s still an annoyance. I think I’ll have to start turning off comments for old entries as a stop gap measure.

Additionally, I notice comments were posting e-mail addresses if no web page was listed. I turned this off and rebuilt all comments. Sorry if this caused any spam for anyone. Feel free to post without fear now.

I just got back from lake Vermillion. Here are a few thoughts.

Speaking of Faith, is truly an amazing radio show. I find that there are very few truly intelligent shows in any broadcast medium that explore faith issues in interesting thoughtful ways. This week’s show was about South Africa’s “Truth and Reconciliation” process and was fascinating. It’s available online if you go to their web page. It will be interesting to see where South Africa goes politically and economically, and to evaluate the effect of the “Truth and Reconciliation” work in another ten or twenty years. SA is a far cry from the country I reported on in the sixth grade.

I have been using gmail now for a week or so. I don’t get what all the fuss is about. It’s very good web mail, but I can’t really see what all the fuss is about at this point. (I still have invites, if anyone wants one, BTW.) Perhaps people are just excited about the disk space available. It makes most IT departments seem a little stingy.

This Michael Moore ala Che t-shirt is one of the wittiest t-shirts I have seen in a long time.

The kids love being at the lake. They love being outside and fishing (better know as tangling), or running around catching bugs. Its fun, but sometimes I long for the days when going to the lake meant catching up on reading and sleeping. The kids have very different ideas about what the phrase “fun at the Lake” means. At least they aren’t eating things off the carpet anymore.

I didn’t see much wildlife up north. I saw some woodpeckers and a turtle from a distance as well as the usual loons. There were a few suspicious noises inside the cabin, which I attribute to mice. I found that someone had left a large sack of sunflower seeds in the cabin, which must have been feeding quite a large family of mice. Hopefully, removing some of their food supply will drive the vermin to the many traps we have been setting out.

Cool election year quiz, CSM Quiz.

After completing the quiz it appears I should probably vote for Badnarik, but I probably won’t.

Also of note election wise is factcheck.org, which tries to debunk (or rebunk) campaign ads. It seems reasonably bi-partisan. It would be interesting to keep score and see which candidate sticks to the facts the most.

278 – 233

Adam Felber, of NPR‘s show “wait, wait, don’t tell me, has a blog and it has a lot of funny posts including this priceless post where he parodies the “Swift Boat” controversy.

That’s too funny.

Seriously, who would have thought Vietnam would be one of the most engaging political issues in the 2004 political campaign. I think both candidates would be smart to stick to more current topics, but neither candidate has taken my advice for a long time.

I rarely watch a real horror movie. The blood and gore genre just has no appeal. I don’t feel afraid, but I do feel revolted at the “carnage for money” aspect.

But movies of people falling apart, “Leaving Las Vegas” or “Trainspotting” which are psychological horror movies, these movies grip me. These are the movie genre where the villain is the little voice in the protagonists head “one more drink” or “shoot up one more time” ; these movies both frighten and fascinate me. You can argue that either of these movies glorifies drug or alcohol use, but frankly both of them should scare people away from abuse of drugs or alcohol IMHO.

I think it’s because I am convinced that nearly everyone is just a few small steps away from doing things that they might consider reprehensible. All that’s required is just one push in a certain direction. It might take a brain injury, lowered serotonin levels, fear, boredom, or just loneliness to drive very ordinary people into doing very strange things.

How far away from doing something “out of character” are you?