If I intend to take the afternoon off, I should start by not even entering this building. It is a black hole for leisure time.
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01:26:03 PM,
Thursday 25 July 2002
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I feel I have been overly negative lately. So, here we go: flowers are pretty.
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(6)
08:32:20 AM,
Tuesday 23 July 2002
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There's nothing wrong with that a weekend off wouldn't fix. Don't ask when I'll actually get a weekend off.
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10:55:53 AM,
Monday 22 July 2002
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Today was incredibly long but it still beat driving to Decatur two days in a row.
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10:47:44 PM,
Saturday 20 July 2002
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After Mirabai's cockroach post I felt the need to provide a good bug story so here it is, courtesy of New Scientist.
"Discussion of genetic technology often raises the "yuck factor". Feedback has stumbled across possibly the yuckiest work of all. Make sure you've finished your breakfast before reading about the kissing bug, Rhodnius prolixus, which lives in South and Central America.
The kissing bug is so dubbed because it often bites its human victims around the mouth. When it bites and consumes a meal of blood, it defecates. Unfortunately, a parasite that lives in the bug's faeces can then enter the body, transmitting Chagas disease, which causes damage to the heart and the central nervous system.
The bug can only survive thanks to gut bacteria that enable it to digest its diet of blood. But newly-hatched kissing bugs have sterile guts. They acquire the bacteria by eating their mothers' faeces.
Enter Ben Beard and Robert Wirtz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and their collaborators at Yale University. They have genetically modified the bacteria in the bug's gut and mixed them with ersatz excrement, made with India ink and ammonia, which the newly-hatched kissing bugs eat, thinking it comes from Mum. The modified bacteria stops the Chagas disease parasite surviving in the baby bugs' digestive system, so it can't be passed on to humans.
So the health and happiness of many people may depend on genetically modified artificial bug poo. Lovely!
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(1)
10:46:27 AM,
Friday 19 July 2002
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Great big sigh.
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(5)
05:30:24 PM,
Thursday 18 July 2002
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Currently in Athens it is 84 degrees. Charming.
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(6)
10:07:36 PM,
Wednesday 17 July 2002
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In my real life I should mention that my proposal is still only almost done. But in my pretend life I rule.
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(2)
05:43:37 PM,
Tuesday 16 July 2002
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My album sold almost 2 million copies yesterday. I feel much better. Thank you.
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(1)
05:43:07 PM,
Tuesday 16 July 2002
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So an investigation has uncovered that Bush received a "flash report" indicating the company was in trouble 16 days before he sold his Harken stock. His defense is that he thought the company was only going to lose $9 million in the quarter, not the $23 million it actually did. So that makes it okay.
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(5)
11:14:37 AM,
Sunday 14 July 2002
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So I'm starting to think that the rockstar game really just doesn't like me. My first single sold 600,000 copies then stopped. My second single, which was significantly better than my first, not to mention that my popularity was much higher, sold less than 50,000. I released my album, which was really good, 3 days ago and it hasn't sold at all. Yes, for awhile the sales were broken. But other people's sales are now going strong but mine aren't. wah.
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(3)
10:02:07 AM,
Sunday 14 July 2002
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I am blogging from my own computer, which is on my desk at home for the first time in months. Rock on.
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(2)
10:27:34 AM,
Saturday 13 July 2002
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The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) approved a statement about "what we believe" this year. Some excerpts
“Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord, and all people everywhere are called to place their faith, hope and love in him. No one is saved by virtue of inherent goodness or admirable living, ‘for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God’ (Eph. 2: 8). No one is saved apart from God’s gracious redemption in Jesus Christ. Yet we do not presume to limit the sovereign freedom of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2: 3-4). Thus, we neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith.
“Grace, love and communion belong to God, and are not ours to determine.” (lines 155-68)
It's supposed to be a compromise between those who think that one must believe in Jesus in order to be saved and those who think that we, as people, can't understand the innate mysteriousness of God enough to make such statements.
I fall into latter camp and have no patience with the former. My real problem with the statement is that it only talks about salvation, as though that's the only point of Christianity. I find that lame. More importantly, I don't think it has anything to do with the stuff Jesus actually said.
A book that I was reading recently, which had nothing to do with religion, made a passing reference to people who prefer Jesus' death to his life. And I think this constant blithering about salvation definitely falls there. What about "turn the other cheek?" What about "love your neighbor as yourself?" What about "blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth?" What about "let he who is without sin cast the first stone?" Forget Paul, and his hate and his agony and his end-times obsession, let's talk about love for a minute, shall we?
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(4)
10:38:33 AM,
Friday 12 July 2002
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I'm not scared because they will drive nuclear waste less than a mile from my home. After all, I grew up within a mile of a nuclear plant. No, I'm scared because they're going to drive it up Broad Street and past 20+ bars filled with 35,000 drunken college kids.
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(2)
06:14:22 PM,
Wednesday 10 July 2002
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Let me summarize:
Summer class...frustrating
Field work...frustrating
Scheduling use of van to do field work...frustrating
Lab work...frustrating
Sharing lab with seven other people...frustrating
Construction on campus...frustrating
Construction all over town...frustrating
The Mikado...frustrating
Remi...rules
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(6)
09:53:16 PM,
Tuesday 9 July 2002
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Chapel Hill would have been awful because of a certain professor and I really needed to get out a Raleigh for a plethora of reasons. But, even if my other choices had been Colorado State and UC-Davis, I still lucked out by coming here.
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(3)
09:51:06 AM,
Monday 8 July 2002
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Ummm...Newcastle pretty and tasty...
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(6)
10:37:33 PM,
Saturday 6 July 2002
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Oz: But we know the world didn't end, 'cause...check it out.
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(9)
10:33:02 PM,
Saturday 6 July 2002
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Because when it comes down to it I really am a lot more Rebecca than I am Enid.
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(2)
08:37:32 PM,
Saturday 6 July 2002
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And now it's off to good ole electronic journals to see how many things I can print out instead of photocopying. I'm doing work. Really, I am. Can't you see that?
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(2)
02:30:06 PM,
Wednesday 3 July 2002
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I've added my first song lyrics to the Johnnie Cabal Rockstargame.com song wiki extravagandza. I am Blerk Blerkity, the folk singer of doom.
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(4)
02:25:31 PM,
Wednesday 3 July 2002
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"He was a good, really an inspired preacher, but his sermons often didn't wholly please the more fundamentalist members of the congregatioin. Today, though, he had given them exactly the kind of message they preferred: strongly grounded in the Bible, condemnatory of outside sinners, congratulatory of their own righteousness."
Sara Paretsky is known for her potboilers starring VI Warshawski. But, unlike most folks I read, she is actually a pretty good writer. And here she was so dead on.
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(1)
11:07:03 PM,
Tuesday 2 July 2002
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Montreat was glorious. Cool, sweet, moist air, good people, birdsongs, a pleasant hike, ice cream, and my dad played the tuba in a brief Salvation Army Band-style afternoon performance. Saw several kids I used to be counselor to all grown up and on summer staff themselves. Said hi to the Nature Hut and the albino corn snake. We ended up not camping at all but accepting the generous offers of various beds. Remi enjoyed his first indoctrination; at times he was all set to move to the mountains, at the very least he'll definitely go with me again.
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04:38:27 PM,
Sunday 30 June 2002
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So apparently George W. Bush is very surprised to discover that corporations tend to cheat when they are not regulated. You mean CEO's are not out for my best interests? But...but...what about the Invisible Hand?
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09:04:12 PM,
Wednesday 26 June 2002
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Remi's going to do laundry and I was warning him about things that might be on the floor that should not be washed. I said, "My pink shorts." He said, "Oh yeah, the green ones." I said, "The pink ones. The woven sort of South American ones." He said, "Yeah, the green ones." I went upstairs, unearthed them, and brought them down, and demonstrated that, while they have small green bits here and there, they are extremely pink. He says they are green and blue. Remi makes no sense.
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(5)
09:02:46 PM,
Wednesday 26 June 2002
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Musicians are smarter than regular people. Well, duh.
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(4)
07:58:21 AM,
Wednesday 26 June 2002
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Why will we repeatedly bail out 10 different commercial airlines but we're all set to let our one and only (publicly-owned) passenger rail service just fade into oblivion, insisting that it must be profitable and that private enterprise could do a better job?
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(7)
07:28:28 AM,
Wednesday 26 June 2002
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I burned my finger on the lightbulb in the trunk of my car. That seems strange enough to blog.
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(6)
04:44:16 PM,
Sunday 23 June 2002
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Today is the 30th anniversary of Title IX, without which high school would have really really sucked a whole lot for me. I salute the novel idea that everybody deserves an equal opportunity to play.
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(2)
06:26:04 AM,
Sunday 23 June 2002
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A Brook in the City
The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run--
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except to forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would ever know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep
---Robert Frost
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08:39:51 AM,
Friday 21 June 2002
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"Forget crusing our enemies to talcum powder with a sledge hammer. We did that last night."
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(1)
02:10:16 PM,
Thursday 20 June 2002
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I'm happy to know that I'm not apathetic, I was just tired.
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(6)
12:01:09 PM,
Tuesday 18 June 2002
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Bush ordered CIA to take Hussein out any ole way they want. Bob Woodward, stickin it to treasonous Republican presidents for 30 years.
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(11)
10:19:44 AM,
Sunday 16 June 2002
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Stupid quotation mark.
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10:15:34 AM,
Saturday 15 June 2002
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I know several of you have heard about this already, but I just thought I'd spread the word. CTY at Johns Hopkins, which is like TIP at Duke for you southern types, wants to review St. John's for an upcoming magazine. If you're interested, go fill out a form here. Say things that will keep the weird people coming and scare the Harvard-wannabes away!
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(3)
10:13:36 AM,
Saturday 15 June 2002
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I've been on for 3 hours. That's probably a dial-up record for me.
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11:51:26 PM,
Friday 14 June 2002
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