The thing that I hate most is that the religious people are all on about "It's freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion." In public spaces, supported by public money, it ought to be freedom FROM religion. Tax dollars should not ever, ever go to favor, promote, support, or further any religion. There should be no mention of any deity in the pledge of allegiance. There should be no deity on the money.
The evangelicals redraw the lines in this argument every time the church-state issue comes up.
They muddy the waters by claiming that not-believing is a religion called secular humanism. Uhm. No.
They claim that "the majority" of people believe in some vaguely similar Judeo-Christian God and that therefore this God has some right to public money and public places.
They refer to the "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" lines in the D-of-I to prove that the founding fathers intended a religious basis for this nation.
They will do whatever it takes to push their agenda of belief upon those who do not believe, including accusing those who DO NOT believe of being haters, intolerant nazis, for opposing harmless demonstrations of faith and goodwill towards men.
And, y'know, they do it all while couching the terms to make it look like they are the persecuted minority.
I live in rural Pennsylvania, where there are a fair number of dairy farmers, medium-sized (more than 300 head) to small (2 cows, for single-family use). From personal observation, bull dairy-breed calves are sold for veal if they're small enough (many holstein calves are born larger than is preferred for veal purposes.) or sold for a fairly minimal amount of money (less than a hundred dollars) to someone who wants to raise a backyard cow for eating.
As was mentioned above, dairy-bred bull calves do not fatten as efficiently and quickly as beef-bred calves. However, for the backyard producer who just wants something to raise for about a year and then make it into burger, this is not a major problem. Efficiency isn't that big of a deal and bull calves do taste good when they get big enough.
Dairy cows need to give birth every year to produce the best volume of milk. Your normal dairy cow gives milk for approximately ten months out of a year. She is "dry" (not-milking) for the rest of the time. Gestation for domesticated cows is nine months and virtually all dairy cows are artificially inseminated. Very few farmers keep their own bulls on site because bulls are dangerous, aggressive, and limit you to one strain of genetics. It's cheaper, easier, and more useful to shop for rated bulls through a service like Sire Power or ABS. Rated bulls have their results on crossing with cows, as well as pictures of their get, in a catalog-style shopping experience. You order what you want and the bull man comes and knocks up your cows with straws of semen you have picked out of a catalog. Seriously. That's how it works, last I checked.
Dairy cows do not last particularly long in production environments, maybe until they're about eight or so. Good-quality cows can produce up to a hundred pounds of milk a day (when just freshened -- the amount of milk produced drops gradually the longer it's been since the cow calved) and lifetime totals for a *very* good cow can exceed a hundred thousand pounds of milk.
There's a class at our county fair in each dairy breed for hundred thousand pound cows -- these are mature dairy cows who have worked hard and been very profitable and not blown udders or anything. They represent the height of the dairy industry for usability, endurance, and continued production, living examples of what farmers are aiming for. As yet, BGH has not made a significant impact in the 100K lb classes, but I'll keep an eye out for developments on that front.
Dairy cows who have outlived their usefulness as members of a producing herd (usually because they do not get pregnant anymore but also because they have suffered a career-ending injury like a blown udder or because they no longer produce enough milk to meet the farm's standards of productivity) are sold for slaughter.
Even pet cows kept for single family use and hand-milked are not maintained once they fail to settle. They are slaughtered and eaten, though sometimes not by the family that owned them. My friend's cow Chocolate (jersey cow, really a good, even-tempered sort) was slaughtered and the meat *traded* to another family for the meat of *their* elderly non-breeding cow so that nobody had to eat a known pet cow.
You get friendly with pet dairy cows -- they need to be milked (probably by hand, if you only have two cows) twice a day for ten months out of the year. You spend time with them. You keep them around for ten years or so. Since they get handled, they're reasonably sane and generally pleasant citizens. It's hard to eat them, but if they couldn't have worked a trading situation (something they did mostly because the kids were still young and didn't want to eat Chocolate), they would have eaten her themselves.
Cows are for eating. That's what happens to them. There is no sense in throwing away upwards of five hundred pounds of humanely-raised, tasty grass-fed cow meat. That would be wasteful.
I'll second votes for Stanwell Perpetual and The Fairy -- both grow nicely in my yard and need minimal care.
I'm also fond of Charles de Mills, a gallica rose that gives me huge quantities of lush blooms in a saturated reddish-purple color once every year in June... I ignore him the rest of the time while he does his best impression of a large green shrub so it's not like there's effort involved, here.
Like John Scalzi, I have a feel for how Red America thinks. I was born and raised in Fulton County, Pennsylvania. I still live and work there. Technically, Pennsylvania is a blue state, but 76% of the votes in Fulton County were for George W. Bush. If that ain't red, I don't know what is.
On the county-by-county map (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004//pages/results/states/PA/P/00/map.html ) for Pennsylvania at CNN, Fulton County is on the bottom center of the state, the smaller and redder of the two reddest counties in the state.
As it happens, I think the Democratic party can expand their base in this demographic if they address the issues properly. However, I suspect that some red state concerns, particularly those based upon fundamentalist religious footing, may not permit accomodation. *sigh* Not your fault, theirs. Their God doesn't really allow for compromise.
Full disclosure: I voted for the Other Side on Tuesday.
The World Science Fiction Convention is the largest volunteer-run annual convention in North America.
I wasn't entirely sure that this was a correct statement, so I did some research.
From http://www.nesfa.org/data/LL/TheLongList.html,
we can see that the 2002 Worldcon had 5916 people as their total-attended number.
From http://www.concatenation.org/conrev/toreprt.html, we get "Over 4,000 registered for, and more than 3,646 had picked up their programme packs two thirds through, the 61st Worldcon, Torcon 3 in Toronto from August 28th to September 1st, 2003." This was, unfortunately, the best data I could come up with for the number of people at the 2003 Worldcon in Toronto.
Worldcon 2002: 5916
Worldcon 2003: 4000+ preregistered
Otakon (http://www.otakon.com) is a volunteer-run convention celebrating anime, manga, and east-asian culture that has taken place yearly since 1994, lately in the Baltimore Convention Center. Data for the con are available from http://www.otakon.com/history_stats.asp
Otakon 2002: 12,880
Otakon 2003: 17,338
There is not an official total for 2004 yet because the con took place this past weekend. The preliminary numbers I've seen are higher than the numbers for 2003, though.
The totals given are the number of individual, distinct human beings who paid (eg. not staff, not Industry, not dealers, not guests) to get into the convention.
Otakon staff are not paid. The nonprofit corporation that runs Otakon retains an accountant (to do the tax returns) and a lawyer (for contracts and stuff). The corporation also hires a sound/lighting company, some bonded security (required by our venue), and some people to run cash registers at registration. Everyone else (more than two hundred souls) volunteers.
Like more than a few other folks here, I could read before I went to school. According to my mother, I picked this up at four.
Phonics, which I got in kindergarten in 1975, didn't impress me much. After all, I'd learned how to read without once drawing an upside-down and backwards letter e (the "schwa" sound). I didn't see what the "schwa" sound had to do with reading and I apparently TOLD the teacher so, in about that many words.
That was not our only area of conflict. I also asked why the pencils and crayons were so fat, who had cut the erasers off the ends of the pencils, why the lines were so far apart on the paper, why it mattered what COLOR crayon we used to circle the correct answer (because whether it was red or purple didn't affect the rightness of the answer, you see...), and why the directions she gave us out loud didn't always match the directions printed on the worksheets.
There were quite a few notes sent home the year I was in kindergarten.
I got through enough phonics to be allowed to not do phonics anymore... the only thing that remains in my mind as "phonics" is how frustrated, angry, and miserable I was about having to draw stupid backward upside-down letter e's that had nothing to do with reading so that I would be ALLOWED to read.
Jakob: First one's free.
Seriously, that particular work is not an average piece of fanfic. Truth is, there's a lot of cruft in any fandom's body of fanfic. The barrier to entry is pretty low.
Sometimes, readers can skirt the cruft by reading the "Must Read" links of other people whose work was tasty... but those links are exhausted in short order if you read like I do. If you've run through the high-grade and the urge still burns, you'll sift through megs of utter drek (probably an activity rather like going through a slush pile at some publishing house, but I'm just guessing) to locate the rare gem lurking in an otherwise godawful geocities archive site. That way lies madness.
Lisa Padol: I agree with you as far as the canon goes... and I'm not the only one. The Slytherins do get pretty short shrift in the books, but so do the Hufflepuffs (whom I can't help but regard as "lame") and the Ravenclaws. Those whom we see in the most detail, those we know most intimately, are Gryffindors. *sigh*
I do feel moved to point out that, even in canon, the Gryffindors are not always portrayed as the be-all and end-all of character. Canon has given us the Fab Four -- the elder Mr. Potter and his cronies -- whom we get to see behaving badly. I'm thinking Sirius, Severus, and the werewolf incident, here. I'm thinking the rat bastard who was the Potters' secret keeper. (Pun intended.) And let us not forget that Harry didn't take it well, finding out that his father was (on occasion) a petty schoolyard bully... but all of this does show the Gryffindorks in a light other than radiant maroon-and-gold approval, doesn't it?
Even so, they hog the spotlight. The books aren't called "Draco Malfoy and the Plot Device" or whatever. (Might be more fun if they were. I think Draco could be far more interesting than he's allowed to be.) Fortunately, a thundering herd of nice fanfic authors have addressed the situation and provided many, many different views of Slytherinity, almost all of which are more amusing than the official book version of those folks.
As an example, A J Hall makes Narcissa... delightful and Malfoy-the-younger tolerable in Lust over Pendle, which, to be honest, hasn't got all that much lust in it. It does have rhodendron slander, though.
TomB: This wasn't a specially-planned walk to harass the dragonfly population. It was a regularly-scheduled walk for exercise purposes. Even though I walk for exercise, I take my digital camera along in case I see something interesting. After all, you never know...
The hatching calico pennant I linked to was surprisingly easy to nab because about a gazillion (easily a hundred) hatched out last Thursday. They were littering the shore of the lake near my house, their reflective wings shining in the sun. My first impression of the scene was that someone had run over a large piece of cellophane with a lawnmower.
I have lived on the shore of this lake for my entire life (excluding college). I had never once noticed a hatching dragonfly before last Thursday. Once I found them, saw what to look for, knew what the process looked like, and had a reasonable idea of likely places for it to be taking place... then it was easy to see them. Stuff like this is a convincing argument for the "you see what you are looking for" view of how minds work. Anyway...
Veering right into too much information for normal people, members of the order Odonata spend a fair chunk of their lives as aquatic buggish things. At the end of the nymph phase, they climb out of the water onto vegetation at the water's edge and they hatch into the actual air-breathing flighted guys that most people are familiar with. When they are hatching (and afterward, while their wings are filling out and firming up) they can't fly at all. They hang onto the husk of their old nymph-form (which you should have noticed in the picture, there) and don't go anywhere. Once their wings are fully filled out and have firmed up, they still can't fly WELL for a while... they can flutter away, but they land again in short order. So that some survive this extended period of helplessness, they hatch out in large populations all at once so that there are too many to all get eaten, a popular biological strategy seen writ large in my neighborhood this year with the Brood X cicadas. (I have lots of cicadas at my house. Huzzah! Go cicadas!)
Anyway, the hatching out thing provides an EXCELLENT window of opportunity for photography... they are unable to escape, relatively motionless for huge (three, four hours) chunks of time, and doing very interesting things during all of that time. The only downside to photographing them during and immediately after hatching is that identification is sometimes tough because many of them have colors that don't match the pictures of fully-adult specimens shown in the average field guide or web-page rogue's gallery.
I wasn't trying to abuse My Little Pony toys. I thought that kitbashing old My Little Pony toys into superhero characters was adorable in a good, retro, geeky way.
My Little Pony (1982), Rainbow Brite (1983), and the CareBears (1983) were all things that I observed from my lofty "too old for that" perch as a junior-high student. I was twelve in 1982. (The dates I've listed are pretty much when the toys hit big, except for Rainbow Brite, where I have the date the TV show started.)
Full disclosure requires me to share what I would never, ever admit to anyone when I was twelve... I wished like hell I'd been young enough to play with them or that they'd had My Little Pony toys when I'd been a little girl. I would have loved them if there'd been any way... but there wasn't. Since my life currently includes my little pony (the kid isn't mine) and my OTHER little pony, I figure it all worked out okay in the end, even though they're not pink with stars on their butts or anything.
Speaking of My Little Pony, everyone's seen the web page for My Little Justice League, right?
Dragonfly in progress...
brand new
about half done
probable finished product (I had to go to work so couldn't stay to watch how the one I was photographing came out, but this was what was emerging all over the place.)
No dragonflies were harmed in the production of these pictures. Pictures were taken with a Canon Powershot S400 using the built-in macro and the for-dummies autofocus. It is better at taking pictures than I am, so I let it do its thing.
Gotcha. I didn't get the Kikkoman flash connection because I hadn't gone to look at it (I'm on dialup at home) yet. Thanks -- makes more sense now.
No clue on the tesseract thing. I was marvelling (again) at the thread heading, which amused me as much as the "Tlak..." one ("Talk amongst yourselves", but jumbled). That one impressed me a lot.
This one appears to be bilingual, in English and... Japanese? (We've seen kabuki prints and other Japanese art often enough that Japanese is plausible. I guess it could be something else, but my gut says Japanese.) My computerized Japanese dictionary informs me that 所有 (read しょゆう, romaji shoyu except it'd have that long-vowel line overtop the u or you could write it shoyuu if you were into that system of romanizing Japanese) means 'one's possessions'... so this could well be seen (okay, free hand with it, but I'm allowed) as "Show me what you've got".
Er. If I am right, do I get a cookie? If I'm wrong, dead wrong, can someone else offer an explanation of how I was *supposed* to read it?
I got a BA in English Literature. That, while fun, didn't do much to set my feet on the path of the wage earner. After graduation, I still didn't know what to do with my life so I got a BS in industrial engineering at a different college. (Engineering school seemed like it would be more fun than a graduate degree in English.) By the time I finished the engineering degree, I knew damn sure that I did not want to be a college student any longer.
Following that surfeit of education, I borrowed money from my family and started my own ISP, a concern which, in addition to giving me broadband and cool toys to play with, has kept a roof over my head and food in my mouth for the last eight years.
And, as with our good friend and author of Night Travels of the Elven Vampire, Mr. Todd James Pierce has an online sample of his published writing which interested parties can go read for free. It is located at http://mailer.fsu.edu/~tjp4773/theliteraryreview-australia.html.
Do go have a look-see. It's not quite to the level of Night Travels... but it's still not prose I'd lay down money for. In particular, I kept wanting to "buy a verb" when I hit the elliptical sentence construction in the second paragraph. I mean, okay, so you can do that. Whoopie! Neat trick. Fine. Now put it away. No, it's not stylish that you do it three times running. Not. Look, I've seen your amusing root vegetable. I smiled weakly, once, which is as much as I'm going to do for any parsnip, no matter HOW amusing it is. Now PUT IT AWAY. *ahem* Sorry. I'll shut up now.
The author of Night Travels -- Elven Vampire has a website wherein she demonstrates her writing style for free so that you do not have to spend good money on her book in order to get a taste of her prose.
Enter, if you dare...
http://www.freewebs.com/elven_vampire/index.htm
I got that it was a chick with a ... samurai helmet that didn't have any color on it. Until someone ELSE mentioned kabuki (in the comments above), I couldn't hook up the black persons in the print to the similarly-clothed figures I'd seen in the "kabuki ping-pong" (http://alonso-andres.sites.uol.com.br/pingpong.html) video about a year ago.
I live in Pennsylvania. If I'm talking about the place in France, Versailles is pronounced "Ver-sigh" but if I'm talking about the town outside of Pittsburgh, I say "Versales". If I'm talking about a french surname, DuBois is said "Du-bwa" but if I'm talking about the town near Altoona, I say "Du-Boys". If I'm talking about the hunchback-of, it's pronounced "Notra-Dahm" but if the subject is college football, I say "Noter-Daym".
Oddly, Pennsylvanians seem to be able to do just fine with Duquesne (pronounced Du-kayne) even though the examples I just gave strongly suggest we'd say "Du-kwesne" or something similar instead of having a go with the foreign pronunciation.
This sort of foolishness must make learning English utter hell.
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