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Jaybird
Requiescat in pace, Donald “Duck” Dunn.
One of my friends recently met Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Space Symposium and they chatted for about 4 minutes about such things as the meme he’s inspired and general love of science and even as I thought “how awesome!”, I felt a surge of envy well up in me and I thought about the various things that I would have wanted to ask if I had 4 minutes with him… the biggest one being “where are all of the stars?”
Shouldn’t we have, light pollution or no, a sea of stars above us to the point where we’d never have a dark night? Shouldn’t we have about as much light as a so-called “supermoon” would provide for us? Where is all of the stuff?
In the debates over the existence of dark matter, I always felt like it was a waving away of the problem. An appeal similar to “aether”, if you will. A fill-in-the-gaps theory that really had no basis in serious scientific fact. A “it’s there, we just can’t see it and can’t test for it but for us to keep our theory, it needs to be there THUS it is there, Q.E.D.” which left me deeply unsatisfied.
Ironically, we have tools at our disposal that were mere science-fiction a couple of decades ago and dark matter, unlike aether, is, in fact, testable not only in theory but in practice and we’ve recently discovered a body of mass larger than any we’ve yet found and may have as much (or more) mass than the rest of the universe combined.
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It just means that my head and my heart tell me it’s 1945. They tell me that when I switch on the radio, it should take a minute to warm up and music should come out, not noise and foul language. They tell me that when I talk about God as something real, people should understand, not look away as if I’m crazy. They tell me that I should be winning a war that will make the world free and everyone equal — not looking at the sad result of sixty years of compromise and lowered expectations. They tell me that I’m just a man. No better than any other. But no worse. -Captain America
After the cut, we’re going to have a “Mindless Diversions Extra!” post that will discuss Thor, Captain America, and the Marvel Movie Treatment thereof and wander through religious and/or political territory along the way. It should also, of course, be considered an open thread. See you after the cut.
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I admit, I was taken aback when I first heard about “The Talk”. I mean, I suppose I knew that this phenomenon probably existed in a plurality or maybe even a majority of cases… but it never occurred to me that this was something that, yes, all African-American parents talked about with their kids. I guess that I had never really thought about it before.
So I asked an African-American friend at work if he got The Talk and, after clarifying “which talk are you talking about?”, he answered “Oh Yeah.” I then asked him his opinion on the whole Derbyshire essay flap and he hadn’t heard about it. I told him that Derbyshire had heard about The Talk and decided to write an essay with his own The Talk that he’d give to his kids, at which point my friend (let’s call him “Parker”, for the sake of convenience) gave what he thought The Talk would sound like if a white parent was talking to his white kids… but I get ahead of myself.
I realized that I didn’t know what was in the talk. I mean, I had heard such things as African-Americans being told “you’ve got to work twice as hard” but never in the context of an entire “here’s how the world works” speech. So I asked Parker “can I ask you what was in The Talk?” and he told me I could… so we set some time aside and I was able to ask. “What was in The Talk?”
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New York recently passed a law banning sex offenders from online gaming networks. No XBox Live, no World of Warcraft, no nothin’. Now, without getting into issues of Romeo/Juliet situations that end up with one of the partners on a sex offender list and without getting into the whole question of whether we should be letting people out of prison who we suspect will be sexual predators, I have a handful of responses to this situation after the cut.
Continue reading this post…
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Maribou 
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Rose 
Naima Van Swol 
Matthew 
Kyle Cupp 
Tina Wade 
Mike Schilling 
Jaybird 
