Zelda's Inferno exercise: pick one (or more) of the following phrases:

but I had saved her
disorganized thrift bin
distanced from the game
it's all owned internally
everything was being replenished
cloudy purple juice runs free

and run with it

walking the dog over by the school on a
fine spring Sunday afternoon
people playing softball on one of the diamonds
adults not kids and so
I remember my father's softball league

my brother and I running around the
other side of the park
while he played his games

watching these people now
their kids running around
as they play their game

but I am distanced from the game
for good or ill
no kids, no family
distanced from the game of marriage/kids/neighborhood politics
distanced from the game
that most are playing
not sure if I feel left out
like being picked last by the pick-up team
or above it
like walking by a tic-tac-toe tournament

and I suppose that
the final answer depends
on who I can find to play with...

for I can dream of one
with whom playing nothing but tic-tac-toe
would be enough

Says the Washington Post, "It's fine that Mr. McDonnell decided to proclaim April as Confederate History Month; the Confederacy is an important chapter of history that merits study and draws tourists to Virginia."

I'm not quite sure it's "fine"; should Germany have a "Nazi History Month?" Perhaps, if the time were devoted to studying how such a fuck-up occurred and how we can prevent it from happening again. But instead, McDonnell's proclamation honors the terrorist group that styled itself the "Confederate States of America". (What besides "terrorists" do you call an organization that used violence to attempt to bring about political change, and opened fire on American soldiers in a time of peace?)

The Post continues:

But any serious statement on the Confederacy and the Civil War would at least recognize the obvious fact -- that slavery was the major cause of the war, and that the Confederacy fought largely in defense of what it called "property," which meant the right to own slaves. Instead, Mr. McDonnell's proclamation chose to omit this, declaring instead that Virginians fought "for their homes and communities and Commonwealth." The words "slavery" and "slaves" do not appear.

Even more incendiary is the proclamation's directive that "all Virginians" must appreciate the state's "shared" history and the Confederacy's sacrifices. Surely he isn't including the 500,000 Virginia slaves who constituted more than a quarter of the state's Civil War-era population, who cheered the Union and ran away to it when they could.

Was it rank incompetence, or was it total disregard for the lives of Iraqi civilians? You'll have to judge for yourself. But what we do know is that the U.S. military killed over a dozen civilians in New Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff, and wounded at least two children, then lied about it.

Now, the heroes at Wikileaks have obtained, and posted to the net, the video that the U.S. government does not want you to see. It may shock you. I hope it does. And I hope you'll think about how many cases just like this haven't been leaked. And I hope you'll make any naive kid you might know, who's thinking about joining the military and being some kind of hero, sit down and watch it, and think about how much glory there is in getting the sort of insane orders that lead to you shooting children and photographers.

Stumbled across on the web: an Erisian Tarot. No actual deck has (yet?) been made, but the guide to it is fantastic Discordian/magical reading.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem centering around the two randomly chosen words: "scotch" and "pickle"

just pickle me in single malt scotch
when my time has come don't bury me in the ground
or put on a pyre
just pickle my corpus in some fine whisky
to protect my flesh against decay
no cheap rotgut, please
have some respect
no rail whisky
ain't I worth the good stuff?

doesn't have to be single-malt scotch, really
some top-line bourbon would be fine
or a nice Irish, make my grandmother's spirit happy
or a quality vodka, for the Polish side of the family --
would sake work? I don't know the chemisty

I just ask for respect and for preservation
for some simple memorial
to live a life worthy of leaving a memento behind

Bloomberg reports on a poll showing that 90 percent of Tea Party backers say that while the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level, 70% want the federal government to foster job creation. Even as 80% say expansion of the government’s role in the economy is a high threat, almost half of them want the government to step into the economy and do something about Wall Street executive bonuses.

And the New York Times profiles Tea Party organizers like Tom Grimes, who called his Democratic congressman for help getting government health care when he lost his job, and then got 200 teabaggers to come to the office of the that same congressman to protest the supposed "government takeover" of health care. Grimes, who also receives Social Security benefits from that chunk of change us working folks get taken out of out paycheck under FICA, says "If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own."

Grimes is also looking into getting a part-time government job with the federal government's Census Bureau.

Or there's Diana Reimer, a national coordinator for the "Tea Party Patriots", who also collects Medicare and Social Security benefits. And there's folks like Jeff McQueen, a former auto parts salesman, who organizes Tea Party groups to agitate for smaller government and who blames the loss of his job on the government not doing enough to regulate trade, saying “The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.”

Says Grimes, “If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore.”

Which pretty much summarizes the teabagger mindset: I know those folks are evil, so I don't have to bother with facts.

I miss having a sane conservative movement in this country, I really do.

If you've never studied computer science -- move on, nothing to see here.

But if you have, you'll appreciate Mike Davey's realization of a Turing machine.

A Turing machine, for those non-geeks who still with me, is a theoretical entity that models the process of computation. In 1936, Alan Turing -- one of most brilliant mathematicians ever, who helped break the Nazi's "Enigma" code and save Western civilization, and for his reward was prosecuted and sentenced to "chemical castration" via hormone injections for his homosexuality, but I digress -- proposed a mathematical model of computation that every CS student still studies today.

Imagine an infinitely long tape, divided into cells, where each cell can hold one symbol. This tape moves back and forth under a read/write head (or the head moves over the tape, it's equivalent), which can read the symbol under it and/or write a new one. The machine has just enough memory to hold one number, its "state", and a finite set of rules that tell it what to do when it seems a given symbol while in a given state: for example, "in state 17, if you see a 0, move the tape 23 places to the right and write a 1".

Anything that can be computed, can be computed by a Turing machine. You might think, for example, that a machine that used a two-dimensional grid of cells could do more than a Turing machine, but it can be proven that a "TM" can simulate such a 2-d machine, and so compute anything that it can. I wrote a lot of proofs involving TMs when I was in grad school.

Of course this is not a practical thing to build. Turing meant it only as a sort of thought-experiment. That's part of the beauty of Davey's construction: it's absolutely useless, completely a work of math art.

New Moore Island, a tiny (about 3 square miles) bit of rock in the Bay of Bengal, has been disputed territory between India and Bangladesh for almost three decades. Well, the dispute has finally been resolved: the island no longer exists, completely submerged by rising seas.

Not a member of the cult of JFK by any means, but here's John F. Kennedy on what it means to be a liberal:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

...

...For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

So Che Guevera is certainly a complex and controversial historical figure, and people's interpretation of his actions and legacy vary widely. But I have to wonder how many of the folks I saw at the anti-war march last Saturday carrying signs from the PSL bearing his face even gave a thought to the irony of carrying a picture of a guerrilla leader at an anti-war march?

(And I wonder how many people with Che's face on their t-shirt or bag are against the death penalty, while Guevera ordered the execution of dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of people, without any sort of due process.)