A friend of mine sent me a link to the United States Beer Drinking Team’s website. Fairly humorous.

Way back when I was wee, I spent a lot of time hanging out with my bro and his friends. His best friend–later to be his best man (who has since fallen off the face of the earth), Ryan Bent, and I put together plans for a Beer Drinking Olympic Team and set to training. We even had a logo, which we’d leave on the table after drinking our first five beers. Each can would leave a ring of condensed water, and we’d carefully set them down each time to form the OBDT logo.

Just reminded me of those good times, thought I’d share.

First off, eeeewwwww. You’ve truly hit the rockiest of rock bottoms when the cops are hosing human feces off you before they put the cuffs on.

Secondly, my high score is 631: you have your mission.

Update: Per Jeff’s request–the one, the only, Hansenelli…

Deron Williams was drafted third, and Luther Head was drafted 23rd 24th tonight. Thing of beauty.

I’m still working on the laptop. It turns out that the wireless button on my laptop (Pavilion zv5320us) needs a software driver to work it. This pisses me off. I’ve got the OS talking nicely to the card itself, but the button turns the radio antenna on and off, and the button doesn’t respond. Every once in a while, I see the light flicker. Very frustrating. I’m trying one more thing, then I give up. And will go out and play tonight, catch the end of the cards game, hopefully.

Good news/Bad news: The Cards won 2-1 tonight. But I didn’t get to see any of the game. Either good or bad news is that I’ve given up on the internal wireless. Ironically, I have a usb adapter that should work. It’s ridiculous… Everything works except for whatever piece of software turns the antenna on. Mighty frustrating.

A few days ago, Charles Austin posted some of his favorite lines from movies and Haws left this one in the comments:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

I didn’t know which movie it was from, but by coincidence or latent memory, I rented the movie last night. How crazy is that, huh? I had seen the movie once before. When I was an undergraduate, I used it for a linguistics paper, in fact. The paper was a piece of shite, but I like the idea enough that I might go back and redo it someday, if someone hasn’t already done it. We had studied how words enter into usage for names of newly invented things, either by taking old words and using them for the new thing, combining morphemes from Greek or Latin in a new way, or just making up a word out of whole cloth, like Xerox. But I was an undergraduate and doing that sort of research on how people actually come up with new words would be hard work, so I just watched a bunch of sci-fi movies to see how people thought that new inventions are named, since many things in futuristic movies don’t have names, since they don’t exist. Blade Runner was one of the best movies for having original names for new things.

According to this page, the rest of my linux install should be a piece of cake. I’m doing about three or four things at once right now, one of which is slowly writing this post. I just got my wireless card working using ndiswrapper, a program that allows the linux kernel to emulate Windows XP enough to use XP drivers to communicate with unsupported hardware. Super nice! Next, to work on the sound and tinker with the wireless script.

It looks like I’ll get to visit the Lou for the Fourth of July. I’m gonna try to see two games, although I imagine the ballpark will be packed to the rafters with all the folks coming in for fireworks and all.

Opinion Journal’s got a piece on “Rethinking Mathematics”.

Link found at One Hand Clapping.

A few days ago, I posted on the mild drought being experienced in my neck of the woods. I taunted the rain gods again today by getting my car washed. Sure enough, I stepped outside a few minutes ago to encounter a monsoon-quality thunderstorm, with rain lashing down so hard I could barely see the buildings across the quad. The gods are susceptible to reverse psychology.

I did a slackware install on my laptop, and it’s working surprisingly well. Alsaconf found my soundcard, but the sound still isn’t working. I’m sure that’ll get itself figured out real soon with some googling. The NIC works perfectly, I’ve got it logged in to the campus network. Haven’t tried getting wireless to work, although I found the relevant scripts and configuration files, and have a good idea of how it’ll get done.

No Cardinals baseball tonight. The weekend series with the Pirates ended on a down note, with a loss filled with missed opportunities, the worst baserunning mistake I can recall having seen, and Izzy’s second blown save to a hell of a hitter in Jason Bay. The joy was temporarily sucked out of me when Al Reyes gave up the dinger to the Pirates 2B. It would have been nice to replace it with new joy with a victory tonight–alas, that’ll have to wait until tomorrow when the Reds come to town. Cass and I are considering taking a trip to the Lou this weekend to see the fireworks and air show at the riverfront, and hopefully to catch a ballgame or two.

So, my task for today was to turn my laptop from an XP machine to an XP/Linux dual-boot machine. The laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive, so I couldn’t use partition magic to resize the XP partition and free up space for the linux installation. I tried my best to slap together a cd-rom image of the two-floppy PM, but without any luck. Next, I tried using Knoppix’s qtparted program, but Knoppix wasn’t detecting my touchpad and was reading the drive funny. Fdisk showed four different partitions where there was only one.

Finally, I ran across Boot-It Next Generation, which is offered in a thirty day trial and allows you to create a bootable ISO image. It worked just as well as Partition Magic… Two minutes after burnign the CD, I have a 20 gigabytes freed up on the hard disk. Now to choose a distribution. I’ve had a hell of a time getting my hands on a copy of Mandrake (Mandriva, Mancoriva, or whatever they’ll be calling it tomorrow). I’m no fan of RedHat, and am thinking Debian might be the way to go if this doesn’t work out. My desktop runs Slackware, so I’ll see how far I can get installing that on the laptop.

The Praxair compressed gas plant, located about nine blocks from Jeff’s shop, exploded today, starting a 3-Alarm Fire, and delaying the Cards game a half hour.

Wow! Fortunately, all 70 workers there are safe and sound.

On a completely different note, this Winimage program is pretty nifty.

It’s been a lousy week. It’s hot, under moderate drought conditions, and not looking to improve on that score. Not as bad as ’88, though.

The heat is keeping me from getting work done at home. I’ve decided to cave in and add a linux partition to my laptop so I can bring it in to work with me (where it’s air conditioned). Hopefully that’ll be all that’s necessary to get my project done, as pathetically late as it already is. I spent most of the day trying to decide which distribution to use. Laptops are notoriously quirky, so I’ve been a bit timid to try and install one on there. I’m gonna see if this SUSE 9.3 will work, although my hopes are low for that. I’ve got stacks of RedHats, Slacks, and even the latest Libranet at home, and Mandrake 10.1 downloading here at work, so one of them oughta work out for me.

The ‘Birds have dropped three straight behind awful starting pitching and crappy batting early. It’s great to have Cal Eldred back, although I hope not to see him tonight. The Soup’s gonna have to go deep and give the bullpen a bit of rest.

Amazingly, the city has voided the parking ticket that was issued to me when a city crew was blocking my driveway while doing chores on private property. It comes as a surprise since my testimony included me admitting that I was parked illegally as the ticket stated. That sure was nice of them. And a nice piece of mail to find in the box. There’s a small paycheck coming in the next few days, as well. Sure beats the usual bills and pizza coupons.

Roger Cedeno will be eligible to rejoin the St. Louis Cardinals tomorrow, where he would be replacing Scott Seabol.

In two hours, we’ll find out whether Seabol is in the lineup or not. Edmonds may be back, and Reggie’s swinging a hot bat. If Scott gets another outfield spot, I’d prefer him in left, with Reggie playing right field, where he played regularly last season until we waiver-traded for Larry Walker.

Update (12:40): The game was a blowout for the bad guys. While I endured Cubs fans rooting for the Reds in the background, Belly Itcher had her usual taunt-fest with Red Hot Mama. Marquis was really not sharp today. Nor was Flores. But Thompson and Eldred both were… They must have been as both relievers took an AB. Seabol ended up playing in right, and fielded his position competently while getting on base twice, raising the slightest of hopes that a roster move won’t occur tomorrow.

Iowahawk brings you intercepted communications from the desk of my senior senator.

Post title from the soundtrack of a classic ’80s film.

I watched the excellent film, The Killing Fields this morning. It’s the story of Pol Pot’s takeover of Cambodia by his Khmer Rouge communist guerrilas, and is full of some heartbreakingly horrific depictions of Pol Pot’s brutality. The main character of the film, Dith Pran, started a foundation to raise awareness of what happened in Cambodia in the late ’70s and to raise funds to rehabilitate his land of birth. One of his fundraising efforts is through sales of his book Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, which I’ll be picking up from the library later today. Hopefully they’ll have an account from one of the children who worked the camps to select which adults would be executed.

I saw the movie once when I was younger, I think in my sophomore year history class–although I don’t remember John Malkovich’s potty mouth being shown in class. I rented it last Tuesday, coincidentally the same day my senior senator’s comparison of soldiers at Gitmo to Pol Pot’s willing mass executioners.

If I have a complaint about the movie, it’s that Sydney Schanberg’s character, played by Sam Waterston of Old Glory Insurance fame, constantly puts the blame for the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power on Richard Nixon for bombing the NVA supply routes through supposedly neutral Cambodia. It’s a bizarre way to spin an atrocity, but I wasn’t even born then. Perhaps he knows something I don’t, since he was there. But I suspect it has more to do with the Western trend to blame ourselves, since our societies are perceived to be more open to meaningful influence than those of the Khmer Rouge or the Taliban, and easier to shame. Schanberg’s more current writing does not show much indication of where the world’s newsworthy events lie. But then again, I don’t see that newsworthy information must come from the White House.

Dee Brown gave a press conference today, announcing that he is withdrawing his name from the 2005 NBA draft to return to the University of Illinois for his senior season.

As expected, the WDWS Sports Talk program was buzzing with excitement over the news. Towards the end of the season, I was pretty certain he’d enter the draft, figuring his hype would never be higher. C-Bot argued that NBA scouts have enough on the line not to buy into hype and probably wouldn’t take him as he was. Over the past few weeks, I’ve come around to the CW that he needs to show that he can play the point for a full season. Obviously, with him running the show next year, the Illini will be a much better team than if we had a freshman or Brock leading the charge.

Driving from here to there, I was listening to the local WDWS afternoon show, Gary O’Brien and Friends. Today’s guest was Steve Alten, who’s writing a book called The Loch, exposing the REAL Nessie. I didn’t get to hear much, since the distance from here to there isn’t all that far, but what I got of his story is that the Loch Ness Monster is an amphibious fish of a species that formerly migrated from lake to the north sea using an underground river that was closed in the 1930s due to road construction. The beastly fish can no longer get to seawater, where she’d spawn and die, and so she lives on, growing larger and larger.

He approvingly referred to the Loch Ness Tooth website, which has some real interesting pictures. The anonymity of that ‘site’s authors does not confer a great deal of credibility upon it, but feel free to check it out anyways. If it’s a hoax, I imagine it’s a hoax perpetrated by the “water bailiff.”

I wonder if Alten hired an ecologist to survey the lake and make an assessment about whether its biosystem could support a large predator of the sort he claims lives there, or how many deer it would need to pick off the shoreline. He says he made a scientific approach, although that doesn’t mean all that much these days, if it ever did.

Boy Rapes Dog to Death (also molests two girls)

HIV Infected Pederast Rescued from Mob in Centralia

Evil, Evil, Evil

But my weekend was great! More on that after work.

An anecdote about mathematical incompetence at the college level well worth reading is: I Don’t Do Math, by Jay C. Odaffer.

The essay was reproduced in a forum thread at Kim du Toit’s, leading to some interesting discussion.

Go thee and view Triumph mocking Jacko supporters. Guaranteed laughs, although a bit difficult to get the sucker to load. Try clicking on the “playing” text if you have troubles.

(Post’s title comes from this Simpson’s episdoe)

Had to run an errand, and on my way out of the neighborhood, I saw a city crew pruning my neighbors trees. When I got home, my driveway was blocked by their truck and they were pruning my magnolia, which doesn’t come near powerlines or overhang the road.

Why the hell is the city doing my chores?

Update: AND, the city issued me a parking ticket while I waited for the truck to evacuate the mouth of my driveway. I contest!

La Russa indicated that Cedeno, sidelined June 6 by a strained right hamstring, will be reactivated sometime next week.

From the Post-Dispatch.