April 2007 Archives

Funny how the birds go and off various foods. For a while, they gobbled up the sweet red peppers I put in their cage; then they wanted nothing to do with them, so I stopped offering them. I tried again months later, and suddenly they’re gobbling again. I love how the feathers around their beaks get stained pepper-red when they’ve been munching all day.

News! Celery, my female, is laying eggs. There were two a couple weeks ago, and then nothing, and now another tonight. I’m pretty sure the birds are not mating -- the word is that parakeets won’t mate if they don’t have a nice snug nest to nurture the eggs in, and these two don’t have that -- so I’m pretty sure the eggs are infertile. Celery seems spectacularly unconcerned with the eggs. The first two were broken by the time I discovered them in the bottom of the cage -- I suspect that Celery pecked at the first one and broke it, but that the second one fell a distance and broke that way. But this third one is intact. I’m gonna leave it on the floor of the cage for a while and see what, if anything, they do with it.

(Technorati tags: birdblogging, parakeets)

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue:

In its most detailed portrait of the effects of climate change driven by human activities, the panel predicted widening droughts in southern Europe and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the American Southwest and Mexico, and flooding that could imperil low-lying islands and the crowded river deltas of southern Asia. It stressed that many of the regions facing the greatest risks were among the world’s poorest.

And it said that while limits on smokestack and tailpipe emissions could lower the long-term risks, vulnerable regions must adjust promptly to shifting weather patterns, climatic and coastal hazards, and rising seas.

Without such adaptations, it said, a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century could lead to the inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. But if steady investments are made in seawalls and other coastal protections, vulnerability could be sharply reduced.

But wait, the truth is really so worse:

Just a few of his many wisdoms:

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

A true geek has passed on.

(Technorati tags: Kurt Vonnegut)

From The Detroit News:

Credit Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally with saving the leader of the free world from self-immolation.

Mulally told journalists at the New York auto show that he intervened to prevent President Bush from plugging an electrical cord into the hydrogen tank of Ford's hydrogen-electric plug-in hybrid at the White House last week. Ford wanted to give the Commander-in-Chief an actual demonstration of the innovative vehicle, so the automaker arranged for an electrical outlet to be installed on the South Lawn and ran a charging cord to the hybrid. However, as Mulally followed Bush out to the car, he noticed someone had left the cord lying at the rear of the vehicle, near the fuel tank.

"I just thought, 'Oh my goodness!' So, I started walking faster, and the President walked faster and he got to the cord before I did. I violated all the protocols. I touched the President. I grabbed his arm and I moved him up to the front," Mulally said. "I wanted the president to make sure he plugged into the electricity, not into the hydrogen This is all off the record, right?"

According to Technorati, somebody tagged a blog post with my name.

It’s a posting about Doctor Who. Figures.

(Technorati tags: Technorati)

A Technorati tag about Technorati. Shouldn’t that cause the universe to implode or something?

This is one of the reasons why I love the BBC: it takes science fiction seriously. I’m not just talking about the awesome entertainment the Beeb has given us over the years, like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 and The Tripods. I’m talking about its new multimedia project My Science Fiction Life, which is looking at the impact that SF -- books, comics, movies, TV, and more -- have had in Britain, on ordinary people, on artists and scientists, on society as a whole. The site invites readers to contribute their own memories of growing up with SF and what SF means to them today. You don’t have to be from the U.K. to contribute, but when the site closes to contributions later this month and organizes itself as an archive, the focus will be on the experence of SF in Britain.

Cassie checks out Sam in his carrier, on his way to the groomer. Perhaps she’s wondering whether she’s about to be an only cat again.

Cassie did seem rather perplexed when I came home without Sam -- he stayed at the groomer’s for most of the day. And here he is in all his newly shorn glory:

Science-fiction Science "fact" author Whitley Strieber says we're about to make first contact with aliens. Or not:

It is possible that the visitors are about to show up. I am not saying that this will happen, but only that this is a time when it could happen, and there are some indications that it may be about to happen.

In other news, it is possible that monkeys might fly out my butt in the near future. I'm not saying this is absolutely going to happen, but if it does, I totally called it, and if it doesn't, duh, I said it might not.

It's possible Strieber's prediction is merely a projection of his fear that James "Scotty" Doohan's ashes will fall back to Earth from orbit and bring fiery death from on high.

In other other news, Strieber predicts the end of the world, Mayan style.

So many ways to meet the doom of our civilization...

You may have seen my two-part interview with Jamie Bamber at last weekend's I-Con over at Film.com. (Okay, it was me and a couple other entertainment journalists at the interview -- I don't want to suggest I had him all to myself, however much I would like that to have been the case.) Here's a snippet of video from the roundtable I shot with my digital camera:

I like the little beard. Very cute.

[via Unscrewing the Inscrutable and Daily Kos]