Category: Rambling

Rambling: raving; ranting; blah-blah-ing; shit-what-is-she-going-on-about-now?; general useless drivel unrelated to much else, including reality

bookmark_borderLottery Winnings

Posted on by PaulaO

No, I’ve not won the lottery. Gotta buy a ticket first and, frankly, I’d rather put my dollar with the others in the Mason jar out in the back yard. Dang, I told y’all where it was and now I gotta move it.

Anyway, this post is more about Spam than anything else. That and gullibility.

I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird for my email accounts. The junk/spam filter on it is pretty good and it learns quickly. I set up other message filters to get rid of the obvious ones. If the spam filter thinks it has a spam, it sends it to the Junk folder where I then can check it out and delete it. I have it set up so that anything I say is spam is sent directly to the trash folder which is emptied each time I close down Thunderbird.

I have an idea for a really good junk/spam filter: have a spell check built in. If the subject line contains a \ or ! in the middle of a word, chuck it out.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of lottery emails. It’d be funny except I know people actually believe those things. So, here’s some hard facts: If you won a lottery in the Netherlands or somewhere in Africa, do you really think they’d let you know via email? Or if someone has umpteen thousands of dollars stuck in some sort of political shift and need your help with it, again, do you really think they’d contact you via email? Or would they, like, I dunno, go to an embassy?

Thunderbird has this column where if I click in it, the email is marked as Spam and away it goes. That way I don’t have to open the email and then hit delete. If your email program doesn’t have this kind of option, try to right click on the email and select delete from there. Opening an email from someone you don’t know or that you know is spam can cause some mean things to happen to 10 people you know. Okay, just kidding on that last bit.

Here’s some other random email advice:

– When the real PayPal sends out an email, they don’t have any links in it. Sometimes, for a real transaction, they will have a transaction number link, but that’ll be it. Why? Because spammers, crackers, virus, and malware folks love to use PayPal to scam folks. The real PayPal says things like: “go to our site, paypal.com” without using a link. Good for them!
– In connection to the above, if you don’t know if you should trust the email, put your cursor over the link. Don’t click on it, just put the little arrow over it. Now, most email programs will then show you the actual URL of that link in the bottom of the window somewhere. Check to see if the URL is the same. Usually, it’s not.
– If a greeting card website sends you an email message and all it says is “a family member” sent you this card, don’t click the link. Legitimate notices of e-cards will say who it is from and often has a short message from them. If you get an e-card and don’t know who it is from, delete it. So for my friends and family: don’t send me e-cards. Yeah, some of them are cute and cool and excellent examples of the artistic uses of flash player, but, really, spend the freakin’ few cents and send me a real card, okay?
– Just ’cause Oprah says it is good don’t mean it is. And just because an unsolicited email says Oprah says it is good, really really means it isn’t good. Delete that.
– Do you really want to order a prescription medication from someone who can’t spell the name of that medication? I don’t care if it does make your man-part stand at attention for hours on end, if they can’t spell it, don’t buy it!
– Same goes for any other penis oriented emails. Do straight women really want big huge penises on their partners? Frankly, it sounds painful. I get more penis email than I do lottery emails. And I don’t do either one of them!

One more thing and then I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing. Let’s say you get a really cute email from someone. It has cute pictures of puppies, babies, kittens, and any combination thereof. I admit, I am a sucker for those things, too. You decide to forward it to everyone you know because it is just so freakin’ cute. Fine. But, after hitting forward and before hitting Send, do a few simple things first. Take a look at that email. Now, how far do you have to scroll down before you get to the cute puppy? Even scrolling a pixel or two if too much. All that information space is usually taken up by the email addresses of all the others who also thought it was a dang cute puppy. Forward after forward after forward. You know, if you send it to me, I’m going to embarrass you something awful. ‘Cause I’m gonna hit Reply All and tell everyone you sent it to that I thank you for giving me more email addresses to sell to spammers! Not just the addresses of everyone you sent it to, but aaaallll those other email addresses, too! I’m gonna make a fortune! Seriously, I’d never do that but it is tempting. (I once tried to count them all and stopped counting at about 120 email addresses that was included in a single fwd-ed message) Delete all that gooble-goop at the top of the message. It’ll take but a second or two. Send the cute picture to everyone you know but use Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) instead of To or CC. This means that no one will know who else got the picture but it also means my email address remains with you and not your Cousin Phil, Uncle Ernie, and your college roomie from ’88. Over the years, I have seriously lost two “friends” because I kept hitting Reply All and thanking them for more email addresses to harvest. And, frankly, if the subject line has more than one Fwd in it, I’m not going to bother reading it anyway. So delete those, too. Don’t send me anything about chain letters or online petitions. My name at the bottom of the loooong list won’t mean crap ’cause it has to be a real signature to count in anything legitimate anyway.

bookmark_borderGoofy Headlines

Posted on by PaulaO

It’s been a while since I’ve found one worthy of putting here. Stupid ones aren’t worthy, just the ones that use two-meaning words.

Anyway, here’s the headline:

Wild turkey sends Maine motorcyclist to hospital

No, really?

Okay, so the article is about a wild turkey, not Wild Turkey.

And, no, the turkey did not survive.

bookmark_borderGays Are, Like, So Freakin’ Powerful!

Posted on by PaulaO

We are! Really! We are so powerful an enemy to God that He punishes everyone for supporting us. Really! We are so terrible a species of human that God wreaks havoc on cities and nations just because they have gay marriage rights and stuff.

Okay, stop laughing, Paula.

I could get angry. I mean, really, why would God kill thousands of people on 9/11/01 just to punish everyone for supporting homosexuals? Kind of odd, really. Why not rain terror during the Gay Pride March in NYC? Or smack Orlando upside the head during Disney’s Gay Days? Now THAT would hold a message, don’t you think? No, “they” think that Hurricane Katrina was punishment to New Orleans. Please, the levees were the punishment, not Katrina. Hurricane Rita did more damage in Texas than Katrina did to New Orleans. Katrina and Rita wiped entire towns off the map, but we never hear about that, do we? But I digress into another rant.

Where was I? Oh, right.

I got onto this particular rant when I read an article on LiveScience: NY Pastor: God’s Wrath Is Near (Again) by Benjamin Radford, LiveScience’s Bad Science Columnist.

According to the founding pastor of New York City’s Times Square Church, David Wilkerson, denizens of the Big Apple should stockpile survival gear and a month’s supply of non-perishable food in preparation for an “earth-shattering calamity” that could happen at any moment. The threat is not from foreign terrorists this time, but instead from God.

Wilkerson, claiming he was prompted by the Holy Spirit, recently wrote in his blog that “An earth-shattering calamity is about to happen… It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires… There will be looting — including Times Square, New York City.” (Only a Manhattanite would assume that God’s destruction of the world would begin with New York City).

(…)

This is far from Wilkerson’s first prophecy; in fact he has made something of a cottage industry of cranking out bible-based predictions. In 1973, Wilkerson issued a nearly identical message in a book titled “The Vision.” He described the great tragedies that would befall the United States if Americans continued to pursue homosexuality, greed, and sin. Nearly 40 years later, the issues include gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research.

Most of his prophecy did not come to pass, but it is a common theme. Rev. Jerry Falwell infamously blamed pagans, abortionists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union and others for bringing about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In Falwell’s view, God had enlisted Muslim Saudi Arabians to punish Americans for their decadent ways. In 2005, Rev. Gerhard Wagner suggested that Hurricane Katrina was “divine retribution” for New Orleans’ tolerance of homosexuals and sin.

(source)

The God I know and follow doesn’t do things like that. God knows that with the knowledge of science, we would need direct intervention, not far flung things like Katrina and 9/11. We are no longer the superstitious God fearing peoples of long ago. We have faith in spite of science, in spite of our knowledge. Now, ain’t that a good thing for God and us?

bookmark_borderFertility Treatment Myths

Posted on by PaulaO

5 Myths of Fertility Treatments

Just as the invention of contraceptives freed sex from the concerns of baby-making, new reproductive technologies have freed baby-making from sex.

Yet despite 5 million such technology-assisted births, plus the recent eight by Nadya Suleman, there remain common misperceptions about “test-tube” and “designer” babies.

The article addresses 5 common myths about fertility treatments.

Myth 1: Designer babies are coming soon

Reports that we will someday be able to artificially choose a child’s traits, “from a scientific point of view, are totally totally made up,” said Sarah Franklin, researcher, author and keynote speaker at The Politics of Reproduction conference held Saturday at Barnard College.

(…)

Myth 2: In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is easy

“The media tends to report the success cases,” said Debora Spar, president of Barnard and author of “The Baby Business,” but failures are the norm.

(…)

Myth 3: Egg donation is common

“It is egg sales,” Spar corrected. Because no one wants to think about money in relation to their child, the baby business talks about “delivering hope” not “profit,” she said, but it is a market like any other.

(…)

Myth 4: IVF increases fertility

Actually, a woman undergoing IVF must first take hormones to shut down her fertility cycle, Franklin explained.

(…)

Myth 5: The children will be fine

“The voice that gets lost in all these debates is that of the child,” Spar said. No one knows the long-term effects of spending, as an embryo, a few days in cultured media or exposed to surges of synthetic hormones, she said.

(…)

The end of the article discusses the recent octuplets births and includes a link to another article.

The Ethical and Legal Implications of Octuplets

We all know about the old woman who lived in a shoe, the one with all those kids and who didn’t know what to do. Well, one thing she didn’t do was have eight more kids. And this wasn’t because nothing rhymes with octuplets.

Having eight children at once — or seven, six, five or four, for that matter — is not healthy for the children. Such human litters rarely occur naturally because, the sad truth is, the children rarely survive to adulthood to mate and to pass along a genetic predisposition to multiple births.

It’s a simple medical fact that the more babies in the brood, the lower their average birth weight. And the lower their birth weight, the more they are susceptible to a lifetime of health and social challenges.

The article, which is much more articulate than my previous post about this, is written by Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience’s Bad Medicine Columnist. He does a good job of discussing the future of those babies and any others in their positions.

bookmark_borderBody Laws

Posted on by PaulaO

There’s an infamous saying in regards to pro-choice: Keep Your Laws Off My Body.

And I agree with it. When the laws start to govern what we can or cannot do to our own bodies, it opens up a whole mess of abuse potential. I do not like the idea of abortion. But I dislike even more the concept of a woman not having the choice. It is her body. The paternal parent of that wee cellular mass can walk away and no one ever know he had responsibility. But for nine months, everyone knows who the maternal parent is. Her body goes through physical and emotional changes. All because she made a mistake, was raped, or was coerced into sexual intercourse that resulted in a pregnancy. To say she has no right to terminate that pregnancy is just wrong. Meanwhile, the male is still going about his business.

And now we are looking at purposeful pregnancies that result in a costly and physically dangerous event: impregnating an unemployed mother of six living at home with her parents. And not just impregnating her with the typical one to three embryos, but with six. Now there are 8 more children for her to feed and care for. 8 more children who will most likely have a disability or two. Three of her other children have disabilities and receive state disability income. She told an interviewer that she was going to return to college. I can’t see that happening. Eight infants and at least one other toddler? The oldest of her kids is 7. That’s what, kindergarten age? Maybe first grade? So that’s maybe one kid out of the house each week day. What of the other 13?

So where does the law fit in this? Who is at fault here? The idiotic woman? The idiotic physician? Should there be laws that govern in vitro fertilization?

In vitro fertilization is when they take eggs from a woman and sperm from a male and do various hi-tech stuff with them. The result are cellular masses (ie embryos) with the potential to be human. These masses are then implanted into the woman’s uterus where, hopefully, they “take” and she is officially pregnant. The accepted rule is that a woman in implanted with anywhere from one to three embryos to increase the chance one or more will work out. These embryos are so small, so early in development, that the division that creates identical twins has not happened yet.

So what happened with the woman in California? Why was she implanted with six embryos at once? Two of those embryos split, resulting in two sets of identical twins. There were so many babies in there, that the hospital’s doctors didn’t realize there were 8 but instead thought there were 7. The smallest is just over a pound and the largest is just over 3 lbs. Altogether, they weigh just 15lb 1oz. I just cannot fathom a single infant that small, but 8 of them? Who is going to pay for their extensive stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (at an average cost of $164,273 each)? Who is going to pay for the 46 or so staff that were there just for the delivery? Who is going to pay for the follow up care? Keep in mind, this is a single woman who lives at home with her parents and already had 6 children, all 7 yrs or younger.

I really don’t blame anyone for wanting children. It will be my number one regret in life that I couldn’t have kids and was unable to adopt. And I don’t want any laws or rules that dictate how many kids a woman can have. It’s her body.

But in this case, we are talking about removing Mother Nature from the picture. This woman became pregnant by artificial means. Purposeful things happened. This isn’t fertility drugs made six eggs drop at the same time into the uterus where they then met oh-so-happy sperm. She already had 6 kids. Did I mention she was unemployed and lived with her parents? But she had six embryos left over from her other pregnancies and decided, along with the physician (and I use that term sarcastically), to have them all implanted at once. Those where her embryos to do with as she chose, yes. I don’t deny her that right. She paid for them, might as well use ’em, right?

The problem here is money. It always comes down to money. And who is going to pay for the result of her lack of common sense? The state can’t say “Sorry, you’re an idiot and we aren’t going to support you” because then they’ve opened the door to say that to anyone. What about the moron that raced down the highway on his motorcycle and crashed? He was an idiot, too, right? Depends on the viewer. Some would say it was an accident, some would say it is his right to drive his motorcycle. What about the guy who gets so drunk his brain fries, making him not much more than a stalk of broccoli? Definite idiot, but should the state say he is such an idiot they aren’t going to help pay for his diapers? The money to pay for this care comes from the taxpayers of that state and from the gov’t deductions from our paychecks. The idea is that if my taxes help pay for the care of the idiots and non-idiots other citizens of my state who have health emergencies, then the same option would be available to me and my family, should we need it.

Should there be laws to govern idiocy and/or lack of common sense? Debatable. Should there be laws to govern the implantation of embryos? Definitely.

Should there be laws to govern the implantation of embryos into an unemployed, living with her parents, and already have 6 kids woman? There should be but I hope there never are. Keep the laws off my body and out of my bedroom. Put it instead in the doctors’ offices and fertility clinics. Put it where it began, where someone put a chunk o’ change down for a service. Regulate that service. I just paid to have My Truck fixed. Laws say they must make it work again and work safely. Rules, both assumed and instituted, say that this part must work with that part. There are no laws that say because I drive a Chevy, I am not allowed to be protected from poor repair work. If I can pay for it, I must be provided with the repair as covered by rules and laws. Why is there more common sense at work with the repair of My Truck than there was in that doctor’s office in California?

bookmark_borderGaza Mess

Posted on by PaulaO

I do not profess to be a learned woman, especially about politics. I know some history, but not much. High school civics class was over 25 years ago. I’ve slept a lot since then and my brain has deleted old stuff like that to make room for newer, more important stuff. Like humorous stuff.

So it should come as no surprise that I have learned some history today from a humor site, Mighty Wombat.

1/5/2009 – New toon is up early. Enjoy. I think I’m recovering from December. The delay is all my mom’s fault. She gave me CoD World at War, and I’ve been playing that instead of drawing silly pictures.

On a more serious note, a couple of folks have sent me emails asking me to sign petitions to get the Israelis to stop whooping butt all over Gaza. So I feel I must sound off.

So listen, and listen close. Firstly, Israel does not give two poops about on line petitions, let alone petitions signed by cartoonists. Secondly, let’s explore the situation from a different perspective, shall we…

What if the people of Mexico elected a government that ran on a “Death to America” platform, then starting firing hundreds of rockets into Texas?

How long do you think the USA would sit on it’s hands before it sent the Army south? Israel waited two months.

No, after day 1 the US Army would be playing catch-up to the Texas National Guard, the Greater Dallas Rod & Gun Club, the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and ten-thousand other pissed off Americans.

So please, keep your petitions to yourselves. I have enough to worry about.

Amen, Wombat, amen.

bookmark_borderAirport Security

Posted on by PaulaO

An article over at WiredNews has me thinking.Let me explain. If you’re caught at airport security with a bomb or a gun, the screeners aren’t just going to take it away from you. They’re going to call the police, and you’re going to be stuck for a few hours answering a lot of awkward questions. You may be arrested, and you’ll almost certainly miss your flight. At best, you’re going to have a very unpleasant day.

Airport Pasta-Sauce Interdiction Considered Harmful

Airport security found a jar of pasta sauce in my luggage last month. It was a 6-ounce jar, above the limit; the official confiscated it, because allowing it on the airplane with me would have been too dangerous. And to demonstrate how dangerous he really thought that jar was, he blithely tossed it in a nearby bin of similar liquid bottles and sent me on my way.

(…)

This is why articles about how screeners don’t catch every — or even a majority — of guns and bombs that go through the checkpoints don’t bother me. The screeners don’t have to be perfect; they just have to be good enough. No terrorist is going to base his plot on getting a gun through airport security if there’s decent chance of getting caught, because the consequences of getting caught are too great.

Contrast that with a terrorist plot that requires a 12-ounce bottle of liquid. There’s no evidence that the London liquid bombers actually had a workable plot, but assume for the moment they did. If some copycat terrorists try to bring their liquid bomb through airport security and the screeners catch them — like they caught me with my bottle of pasta sauce — the terrorists can simply try again. They can try again and again. They can keep trying until they succeed. Because there are no consequences to trying and failing, the screeners have to be 100 percent effective. Even if they slip up one in a hundred times, the plot can succeed.

(link to full article)

What the author of the article is missing is something my brother and I thought of last year when we all flew to Orlando. They flew there from Philly, I came from Charlotte. We met in the Orlando airport. At that point, we’d all already gone through security checkpoints. We’d all been cleared and have the legal amount of allowable liquids.

What Kev and I thought of was this: including the kids, there were 5 of us, each with potentially 3-9oz of liquid. That’s a total of 15-45oz of liquid. All beyond the security check point. All from two different airports standing around in a 3rd airport. What’s to keep someone from collecting the liquids from the others and getting in a plane with enough to do whatever it is they can do with it?

Or are we missing something in this liquid terrorist hoopla? Do they swipe the quart bags for explosives like they do my dangerous CPAP machine and the laptops?

bookmark_borderWriting for Whom?

Posted on by PaulaO

Used to, I just sat down and wrote. My mind wasn’t crowded by crap such as sentence structure, plot, and the dreaded Show, Don’t Tell. (shudder)

I could sit down and write several thousand words a day and not break a sweat. A story just flowed from one point to the other, rambling along its way. When it was done, I just cut out what didn’t need to be there and fixed the rest.

Now I’m lucky to get several hundred words a day. I keep thinking (which is a problem of its own) about where the paragraph/chapter is going, how to keep it in line, etc etc etc. I don’t let the story just take off and take me along with it.

It’s driving me nuts.

It started not long after BGCFA was released. I stopped writing for myself and started writing for Them. The fun, the joy, was lost in the chaos. Or, perhaps, it was lost in the order. Chaos is something I almost thrive on. Yeah, sure, I like my sheets to match. And I like all the spoons in the drawer to face the same way. And watching me play Tetris would make you think I have OCD. Trust me, I don’t have OCD (or CDO, which is the same but in alphabetical order like it should be).

I am trying to write, honest I am. The deadline isn’t bothering me, so that’s not why I am failing. I tend to set myself up to fail in order to prove I am scum on the pond God created. I may not have OCD but I do have OHR. Anyway, I am trying to write. I want to let loose what is inside but it is hesitant. Afraid to show its face only to get slapped down by the Chicago Manual of Style. And since it knows the CMS is a hard back book of 956 pages, it isn’t going to just rush out and greet the world again. I may be crazy but I ain’t stupid.

What I think I will do is dig out my Zen, select the Writing folder of music, and just start typing. Worked before. Maybe it will work again.

bookmark_borderRomney Out!

Posted on by PaulaO

Yay!

That man scared me. Still does. Something about him gave me the willies.

In a BBC article, he is quoted as saying:

In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.
Mitt Romney

See, that’s what scares me. The man probably truly believes this. We surrendered to terror already when Shrub sent troops to Iraq. We surrendered to our terror of terrorists by letting those in power do things they shouldn’t. We surrendered to them, The Bush Administration, by sitting back and not arguing. Or not arguing loud enough. We were told we should be afraid. That part is right. But we were being told to be afraid of the Wolf by the Fox itself.

As for Obama and Clinton, I am for Obama. Yeah, I know, I should support the woman. But I can’t. Bill Clinton tried to do a good job while in office but his penis got more attention with congress. If we want change, true change, then Hilary Clinton isn’t that change. I feel our best chance as Americans would be to have Obama as president with Hilary Clinton as vice president. With his penis and her brain, perhaps we will regain what we have lost in the rest of the world’s eyes.

bookmark_borderThings To Do

Posted on by PaulaO

Instead of write:

– clean fish tanks, inside and out.
– make fish and snail food (which really is odoriferous)
– sort through “to be filed” stack and put in order (but don’t actually file ’cause that’s something you can do later, see)
– surf the ‘Net looking for the answer to a question you’ve not asked yet (very Zen, I think)
– rearrange decorations in 56g tank just for giggles
– stare out the window toward the bird feeder and pretend you are deep in thought when, in reality, you’re wondering just where the heck did all those Cardinals come from and could they get any redder without exploding?
– look around on desk for some obscure USB adapter that you put away somewhere “safe” and haven’t seen since. not that you need the adapter…
– read through the scads of posts from the High Performance Software Defined Radio e-list. The technical talk makes little sense but to read it feels as if you are doing something with the brain.
– spend time putting this post together, including all the linkages.