Belief-o-Matic

June 2, 2002 / / 3 Comments

Jonathon led me to the Belief-o-Matic. I usually avoid these things, but this was interesting. I ended up marking all but two of the questions as high priority. I wasn’t aware I was such an opinionated bastard. Heh.
Anyway, my results, for what they’re worth :
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Secular Humanism (95%)
3. Liberal Quakers (91%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (89%)
5. Nontheist (75%)
6. Neo-Pagan (74%)
7. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (68%)
8. Bahá’í Faith (66%)
9. Theravada Buddhism (65%)
10. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (63%)
11. New Age (57%)
12. Jehovah’s Witness (52%)
13. Orthodox Quaker (49%)
14. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (48%)
15. New Thought (45%)
16. Mahayana Buddhism (43%)
17. Reform Judaism (41%)
18. Sikhism (41%)
19. Taoism (39%)
20. Scientology (37%)
21. Jainism (33%)
22. Hinduism (30%)
23. Eastern Orthodox (24%)
24. Islam (24%)
25. Orthodox Judaism (24%)
26. Roman Catholic (24%)
27. Seventh Day Adventist (24%)
I’m not going to tell you the ‘official faith’ of the university at which I teach. That would result in gales of uproarious laughter, and this is a serious subject, damn it!
(Oh, and it’s not Scientificology. What the hell is that doing on the list? If Sciencology is a religion, the Pope is a cheeselog.)
Edit : The above might have looked very different if I’d seen this Scientific Proof of GOD (SPOG) first! Or not.

Somebody stop me before I blog again

June 2, 2002 / / 9 Comments

One final one before I go watch some funny moving pictures : Graham says

I came to the conclusion, which I believe is a fairly rare one, that I don’t like being anonymous. That writing under a pseudonym (or no nym at all) feels more stifling than the responsibility that comes with openness. That I am willing to accept the fact that my students, yea, even my colleagues may eventually find this place. I’m counting on the fact that most of them won’t care. I understand that for every academic blogger who gets tenure, there will be many, academics and non-, who get dooced.

Warning : Shameless narcissism ahead!
These are thoughts that have crossed my tiny feather-capped mind more than once, and I have elected to go in the other direction – towards some degree of anonymity in my ramblings and rantings here. I realize, of course, that anyone with even moderately advanced search skills could dig up my real name, and fairly convincingly tie it to the pseudonym I use here, if they wanted to.
‘Anonymity’ is probably the correct word to use, technically speaking. Many of the folks who come here frequently probably don’t know my name. Most don’t care, I’m sure. As far as they are concerned I am mercifully free of an onyma. I am aware that the use of a pseudonym so flippant and fanciful predisposes many to expect me at all times to be similarly flippant and fanciful, in much the same way that my choice of domain names arouses expectations of what may be found here, and encourages attitudes towards myself and my words that differ with the reader. Not all of these preconceptions are positive, this is certain.
But it’s all good. It adds a level of metaplay to the whole thing that amuses me – I think it’s much more fun to use the opportunity bust up those mental Markov chains a bit. I derive some pleasure from anticipating and feeding the expectations that some people must no doubt have at the prospect of reading the words of someone who calls himself stavrosthewonderchicken and who puts his writing and pixelling up at a place called Empty Bottle, and then gently, with a grin, confounding them. Such opportunities would not arise if you, dear reader, had typed in http://www.johnsmith.org to get here, and if posted by John Smith were appended to each post. If that were the case, you’d have no real idea what to expect, I don’t think, other than perhaps an intimation that you might be looking at calm seas ahead.
Note that my real name is not John Smith. Or Markov Chaney, for that matter.
But all this is really an aside to my main reaction to what Graham was saying, which is this : I don’t really feel that I am at all anonymous, despite the fact that I use a pseudonym here for fear of repercussions from my employers. On the contrary, I get the feeling that there are quite possibly more people around the world who recognize the (hopefully memorable) silly name I’ve adopted here and at Metafilter than there are people who know me by my real name. There are many who know me by both, and that’s fine too.
It’s certainly possible that I am taken less seriously as a result of my pseudonymity, but it’s also possible that more people remember who I am, and identify with or enjoy in some meaningful way the persona I’ve created here, which bears if not a 1-1 correspondance, at least a very significant resemblance to my Self. I am, as are all of you, much more than my words and links and photoshop jobs could ever really capture, and I think it would signal a descent into madness if I began to try to express the Whole Story of Me here in these pixels and bits. Better for me, I think, to filter the large and rather incoherent Me through the pleasantly warped lens of my alter ego. I’m cool with that.
There are a multitude of John Smiths, some more memorable than others. But there’s only one Wonderchicken.

Trail Mix

June 2, 2002 / / No Comments

A little summary of some of my thematically linked wanderings this evening…
Student to be put on trial for heckling Bush I…

..”At some point I think Bush made a reference to Nicaragua,” said Kenneth Houp, one of Markovich’s attorneys. “That’s when Markovich stood up and yelled (an expletive) and was hauled off by the gendarmes.”

What was that pesky f–king thing called again? The constitution?

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Bill Bennett to Noam : Jane, you ignorant slut.

“Noam Chomsky : …Well, for example, the United States happens to be the only state in the world that has been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism, would have been condemned by the Security Council, except that it vetoed the resolution. This referred to the U.S. terrorist war against Nicaragua, the court ordered the United States to desist and pay reparations. The U.S. responded by immediately escalating the crimes, including first official orders to attack what are called soft targets — undefended civilian targets. This is massive terrorism.”
Bennett : Yeah, well you’re a big poopyhead! Nyah!†

Bush II, meanwhile, is back to his usual jukes-and-kallikaks action :

“During a conversation between the two presidents, George W. Bush, 55, (USA) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 71, (Brazil), Bush bewildered his colleague with the question “Do you have blacks, too?”

As the search for a scapegoat other than the blindingly obvious unelected pResidential one really gets underway :

Dear Director Mueller:
I feel at this point that I have to put my concerns in writing concerning the important topic of the FBI’s response to evidence of terrorist activity in the United States prior to September 11th. The issues are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY and go to the heart of the FBI’s law enforcement mission and mandate.
[…]
To get to the point, I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring.
[…]
I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons…

What is happening to your country, my American friends? How sad it is to watch it all fall slowly apart.
†OK, I made that part up. See, I told you I wasn’t a journalist!

No security clearance for you, dogfcuker!

June 2, 2002 / / 4 Comments

Via MeFi, of course, this gentleman was turned down in his application for Military Security clearance because of his slighty excessive fondness for our canine pals :

“Applicant admitted the factual allegations of the SOR; accordingly, I incorporate Applicant’s admissions as findings of fact.
Applicant–a 25-year old employee of a defense contractor–seeks access to classified information.
The allegations of the SOR revolve around Applicant’s zoophilia–his sexual attraction to animals and his sexual activity with dogs from approximately 1987 to June 1996. On 13 August 1998, Applicant described his zoophilia to a special agent of the Defense Security Service (DSS)(Item 5):
I would like to take this opportunity to explain that I am a zoophile, sexually attracted to animals. I fantasize about sexual activities with anthropomorphic (cartoon character types) animals, friendly big cat like a lion, any medium to large size dog, horses, cows, etc., but to actually engage the animal must be a dog. The reason I state it must be a dog because a dog is the only animal who has the closest personality to a human being.”

I don’t really know what to say about this. I’d like to say “Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto,” but this just pushes the envelope a little too much for me, ya know?

Distant water-coloured me-mories…

June 2, 2002 / / No Comments

Just finished watching the Ireland vs. Cameroon match, and though I’m far from an expert in such matters, I enjoyed it a fair bit. Averaging one goal every 45 minutes : I guess that’s major excitement in the soccer world, huh?
The reason I mention it is that it was almost precisely 12 years ago, during the World Cup in 1990, that the Wonderchicken was born, the uncreated conscience of my species, forged in the smithy of my liver. A couple of days after this blessed event, Rick and I were in a lovely little B & B in Aberystwyth, Wales, and watching the match between Cameroon and Ireland. Our viewing was made more enjoyable, if indeed that were possible, by the presence of a Large Bottle of Vodka. This we drank (which is the primary use to which one puts Large Bottles of Vodka, other than bonking people over the head, of course), and cheered lustily for the underdogs, Cameroon, who ended up the victors.
Although my powers of recollection tend to suffer when battered by such oceanic quantities of booze, I seem to recall that we ventured out into the night at the conclusion of the game, wobbly but under our own power, navigating by the bottle, and ended up in a pub, where Rick also ended up swapping saliva with a nubile young lady. This was the time in our lives when this sort of thing still happened, albeit irregularly.
The next morning, the proprietress of the B & B, waggling an admonishing finger as only middle-aged Welsh matrons can, suggested that we should find alternate lodging.
She must have been an Ireland supporter.

Rank

June 1, 2002 / / 4 Comments

I’m not American, but I still find it interesting, if pointless, to observe that my surname (that is, my secret identity when I’m not fighting crime) was ranked #5662 in the last census there. The name I was born with, which was different, for reasons I can’t be bothered going into at the moment, is ranked #2666.
‘Wonder’, however, was ranked 48,816th. That’s cool.
It would seem that no-one in America has the surname ‘Chicken’. Go figure.
‘Kim’, number one with a bullet here in Korea, is only #233 in the States. Korean surnames are in and of themselves an interesting study. There are only about 270 last names in Korea, but the five most common – Kim, Lee (variously romanized as Yi or Rhee (actually pronouced ‘Ee’)), Park (Pak, Bak), Choi (Choe, Chae), and Chong (Jong, Jung, Chung) – belong to more than 50 percent of the population. Kims make up 22 percent of the population, or about 10 million people, and the Lees (Rhees, Yis) comprise about 14 percent.
America’s number one? ‘Smith’, of course. Why is it that I’ve only met one person named ‘Smith’ in my entire life? And further, why the heck would that name be so common? There couldn’t have been that many blacksmiths around, back in Ye Olde Oldentymes…

A request for assistance

June 1, 2002 / / 1 Comment

Shelley has asked : “If you work with Linux (all flavors), Darwin, Solaris, HP UX, FreeBSD, etc. – any version of UNIX – and you have a tip or trick based on the following subjects, could you please send me an email with your suggestion […] If you’re the first with a tip, I’ll make sure you’re accredited for it in the book. I need to get these chapters finished next week, so I’m hoping to get tips and tricks this weekend.”
If you’re one of them Unixfolk, please go help the ‘Bird – you’ll get a BurningBird™ Brand Flame Retardant Beanie*!
*not really, but you will get credited in her book.