Q. Where would you expect to find textual material such as the following?

The Life Force, then, with its almost holy purity, is in danger of being inhibited, dampened down and threatened by what amounts to some entirely physical dirt that gains access to that temple of the soul the human body. Whilst in Traditional Chinese Medicine impurities in the mind, emotions or spirit are just as important as physical impurity, it is naturopathy that focuses upon the actual physical sewers of the body.

A. In the course notes for a B.Sc. (yes, that’s a Bachelor of Science) degree course in “Nutritional Medicine” at Thames Valley University in England.
WTF?!?!
Full details here.

I’m composing this blog entry from my room in the Maldron Hotel in Smithfield, Dublin. After enduring a variety of bizarre and expensive hotel internet access schemes on this trip, I was pleased to find that Maldron offers “FREE Broadband Connection”.
However I’d happily pay extra for a service that actually works.
I’m not sure exactly what they’ve screwed up, but my guess is that it’s the DNS server portion of the proxy server they’re using. The first time I point Firefox at a new URL, it immediately fails, just as if the DNS server had returned a authoritative “not found”. If I hit “Reload” a few times, the page will eventually load. Or some of it will. On a moderately complex site, like My!Yahoo! or the Guardian newspaper, the first “successful” load will yield a mangled, unstyled page together with dozens (even hundreds) of errors, because every image, CSS, script, or iframe that refers to a different URL will fail to load. If I’m lucky, I can load the complete Guardian front page with no more than ten clicks on “Reload”. And the DNS entries have incredibly short TTLs: by the time I finish typing this piece, I can be pretty sure that the entry for geoffarnold.com will have timed out, and I’ll have to reload a few times. (Memo to self: copy the text of this entry to the clipboard first, just in case WordPress loses the plot.)
Add to this the fact that it’s impossible to use a VPN (I can establish the tunnel, but I never receive any traffic), and that the WiFi in the restaurant is completely non-functional, and you can understand why I won’t be returning to this or any Maldron any time soon. (I stayed here before when it was part of the Comfort Inn chain; I don’t remember it being this bad.) And if any Maldron employee picks up on this, please fix your service.

Via Boing Boing:

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John notes that watching Sleeping Beauty on Blu-Ray requires that you accede to over 120 pages of legal garbage in various EULAs before you can start the movie.

From AFP:

The Victorian Aboriginal Education Association said instructing girls on how to play the [didgeridoo] was an extreme cultural indiscretion and has called for the book to be pulped.

OK, I can believe that it might be a “cultural indiscretion”, whatever that means. No reason not to do it, of course – and no reason to pulp the book. I bump into cultural indiscretions all the time, most recently from the RNC in MSP.
But then it gets really silly. According to the association’s general manager Mark Rose:

“We know very clearly that there’s a range of consequences for a female touching a didgeridoo — infertility would be the start of it, ranging to other consequences,” he said, adding: “I won’t even let my daughter touch one.”

WTF?
Someone should ask Mr. Rose to explain exactly what he means. Infertility is pretty well understood: which parts of a female’s reproductive functioning would be affected by touching a didgeridoo, and how? What would the causal mechanism be? How would the “consequences” be manifested – would they show up on an X-ray or ultrasound, for instance, or would it be necessary to test hormone levels?
Rose describes it as “cultural ignorance”. It seems that the real ignorance shown here is his own superstitious ignorance of science and medicine. And I refuse to play the patronizing multicultural game of assuming that Aboriginals are incapable of living in a scientifically informed culture, and that their mythologies are so fragile that we must all pretend that they correspond to reality.

Amazon.com is becoming a large company, and I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that I met a colleague here in Chennai who had travelled out from Seattle on the same flights that I’d taken. What did surprise me was to learn that on the segment from Frankfurt to Chennai, the passengers in economy had no food whatsoever. I’d upgraded to business class, and I thought that it was disappointing that, because of the strike, we’d got a hot lunch but no other food except a bag of assorted snacks. I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was.
Nine hours, fifteen minutes without food. Longer, actually, because our take off was delayed while we received a fresh overflight clearance for Iraq and Iran. That’s ridiculous.
(Now I’m even more anxious about whether I’ll be able to upgrade my return flights on Wednesday. Right now I’m waitlisted…)
UPDATE: It looks as if the strike is over.

I was going to post my thoughts about the killings at the Tennessee Valley UUC, but
Terry put it better than I would have done.

Over in the UK, it appears that we are just one step away from requiring a criminal background check to be a parent…

A woman was prevented from taking her own son to school because she hadn’t been screened for a criminal record.
Jayne Jones had been escorting 14-year-old severely epileptic Alex each day by taxi, taking specialist equipment with her in case he had a fit.
But the mother-of-two was told she would not be allowed to continue doing so until her details had been run through a Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) check.

More here. Yes, I know it’s the Telegraph, but they’re not making this up. Indeed the bureaucratic drone that they quote sounds quite unapologetic for this totally imbecilic policy.

This is simply sickening:

Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft. […]The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.
Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.

OK, here’s the situation. An English woman and her two teenage daughters visit New York on holiday. The woman is taken ill. What happens next? Full marks if you guessed that the girls were taken to an orphanage, separated, strip searched, given a medical examination, told that they couldn’t visit their mother in hospital, and locked up for the next 30 hours! (The Beeb has the story here, while the Guardian has more details.)
One more famous victory in the American war on tourists…

Larry nails big-Ell Libertarians:

Libertarians tend to be upper-middle-class professionals. What these Libertard upper-middle-class professionals fail to realize is that their status and wealth is protected by un-Libertarian law and custom (i.e. requiring law degrees and bar examinations; why not let the market decide who should be a lawyer?)
The truly wealthy realize they don’t need a political philosophy to protect their wealth. Indeed, the very wealthy usually realize their wealth — just like the wealth of most of the middle-class — derives precisely from the non-Libertarian structure of society. Henry Ford couldn’t have become rich unless his workers were paid sufficiently above cost to afford to buy his automobiles.

The thing which I find infuriating about Libertarians is that they treat their damned philosophy as some kind of Revealed Truth, just like religious fundies. Things like property rights and markets are human inventions: fairly recent ones, and (if history is any guide) quite likely to be modified or replaced over the next few thousand years.