The England vs. Trinidad & Tobago match just ended. For the first 82 minutes it was horribly frustrating to watch: England had possession two-thirds of the time, but were incapable of putting the ball where it needed to go… in the net. And then Rooney came on and inspired everyone, and Beckham put in the perfect cross, and Crouch kept his eye on the ball for the first time in the match. 1-0. And at the 90th minute, Gerrard pulled off a beautiful, lightning-quick, feint right, lunge left, shoot sequence to make it 2-0. Delightful. Just don’t leave it so late next time – OK?
Being An Oxymoron
A breath of fresh air from liberal evangelical Tony Campolo
I’m one of those pro-life Christians who is convinced that the outrageous number of abortions each year are more due to right-wing economic policies than to Roe v. Wade. In a society where many poor women must work outside the home at a ridiculously low minimum wage just to survive, yet have no access to daycare for their children, we should not be surprised if they seek abortion when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Yet many of the Religious Right Christians who share my pro-life sentiments tend to oppose enacting legislation that would enable poor women to give birth and keep their children. No wonder one of our critics says, “Evangelicals are people who believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Too often it seems like we care about protecting the unborn, but we’re not willing to provide for the born.
The reinvention of Jini proceeds apace
Rob Gingell once observed that “those who do not use Jini are doomed to reinvent it.” Today Warren brings us up to date on the way this reinvention is happening in the WS-splat world:
How deliciously ironic that the WS architects are (badly) re-inventing executable bytecode (BPEL), types (XSD) and interface centric service development (SCA).
I’ll reserve judgment on his “(badly)” evaluation, and simply note that I can remember a conversation with one of the people involved in SCA in which we were lamenting the fact that software engineers are notoriously ignorant about the history of their discipline….
Swiftian satire
Jonathan Swift was the most brilliant satirist of the 18th century. From the outrageous “A Modest Proposal” to the subtle delights of “Gulliver’s Travels”, he demonstrated that the stiletto of satire could be more effective than the bludgeon of outrage. And now the blogosphere has its own Jonathan Swift. Here’s a sample of his work, from Ann Coulter Tackles the Menace of Widows and Grieving Mothers:
Coulter is understandably frustrated at how the liberal media fawns over these women and hangs on their every word, while she has struggled to get her message out through the occasional television appearance, talk radio, college campus tours, her syndicated column, her website and her bestselling books. The media seems to believe that these women deserve some sort of special status just because they happen to have lost a loved one, even though they lack Coulter’s long list of credentials. These narcissistic women persist in believing that their loss was somehow greater than that of the rest of the country who watched it all happen on television.
Brilliant. And then there’s the case of the suicides at Guantanamo:
Admiral Harris contends ominously that the suicides are in fact an act of war against the United States. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but rather an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us,” Harris said. Asymmetrical warfare is a tactic used by a weaker enemy to surprise and disorient his opponent. In order to restore symmetry to the battle, our side will have to engage in increasingly self-destructive tactics of our own and abandon certain principles and ethical values that hold us back and hand our opponents weak points they can exploit to strike back at us, a strategy we are already using with some success in Iraq.
Scoble on Jonathan, and laid-off bloggers
Legendary Microsoft blogger Scoble (soon to be ex-MS) recently visited Jonathan Schwartz at Sun. His account of their conversation is well worth reading. I found the following comment about the impending layoff particularly interesting:
For one, Sun is going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog — on Sun’s dime. Now, I can imagine the kind of vitriol and crud that’ll get posted by workers who’ve just lost their jobs. That takes real corporate bravery and my hat is off to him. One good thing about this? It’ll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There’s a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.
So does this apply to recently-laid-off Sun bloggers: will their blogs.sun.com accounts will be unfrozen? Can I get geoffarnold.com added back to b.s.c/planet.do? (At least until I land a new gig.)
And I guess they’ll have to change the b.s.c title, which currently reads:
This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.
Random 10
It’s Sunday morning, and the British Grand Prix finished a little while ago. However here in the USA it’s being televised tape-delayed on one of the major networks at 1pm EDT, so I’m trying to avoid all sources of news. Let’s see what iTunes has for us:
- “Alone Again With The Dawn Coming Up” by the KLF (from Chill Out)
- “Astrid + Rope And Glory” by the Legendary Pink Dots (from The Tower)
- “Back Side Of The Moon” by the Orb (from Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld)
- “Falling Farther In” by October Project (from Falling Farther In)
- “Five A.M. in the Pinewoods”, a poem by Mary Oliver (from At Blackwater Pond)
- “Genie On A Table Top” by Al Stewart (from Famous Last Words)
- “Good Times Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin (from Led Zeppelin Remasters)
- “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Johnny Cash (from American IV: The Man Comes Around)
- “In My Dreams” by Crosby, Stills & Nash (from The Greatest Hits)
- “Overture” by The Who (from Live At Leeds – Deluxe Edition)
I just noticed that Susie’s sunday morning shuffle includes “When Fall Comes to New England” by Cheryl Wheeler. I haven’t got around to ripping any of our Cheryl Wheeler collection – what an omission!
The value of reading
There’s a mind-blowing piece over at present simple: the kind of thing that makes you wonder what planet you’re on. The author (a lecturer language instructor) was talking to a group of students about reading:
I asked the other three students (there were only four) how much reading they did. All three of them said that they didn’t read books at all. Ever. They didn’t seem ashamed to admit this, even though they are all university students in their third or fourth years. They don’t even read textbooks. I asked. They said they didn’t need to, to pass their courses, and since they found reading hard work and didn’t enjoy it, what was the point?
Then one of them looked thoughtful. “Do you think reading is good for anything?” he asked. “Do you think people should read?”
He really wanted to know.
How do you answer questions like that?
I don’t know. How do you? (My emphasis, in case it matters.)
Happy birthday Tommy!
What a difference a year makes!
Read PZ's talk at the KosFest
Imagine being an electrical engineer and hearing that a third of the country doesn’t believe all that stuff about electricity and radio waves, but thinks there actually are little people moving about inside their televisions. That’s how biologists feel about the state of knowledge about biology here; we’ve got a lot of people with medieval attitudes about the subject.
Back to the rain (with a bonus)
I’ve just arrived back in the (very wet) Boston area after a remarkably tedious trip from Seattle. The SEA-DEN flight was OK, but for some reason air traffic control imposed a draconian flow control policy into Boston, and the DEN-BOS flight was a couple of hours late. Boring.
The bonus was visual. After taking off from SEA, our 757 had to climb through a fairly thick layer of dense cloud. When we emerged, the top of Mount Ranier was right in front of me. Since I had my camera handy….
