The weather today has been very, very odd. Everyone is using the word huracán for what is in store for us tonight. Nora and I spent much of the afternoon outside in the unseasonably warm temperatures and brisk breeze. We saw several dumpsters that had been tied down to keep them in place. There were a few strange occurrences, such as when it rained from a perfectly blue sky.
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There’s a big hubbub lately in Spain because the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA, are beginning to enforce a silly law that has existed for a while: that it’s illegal to play the radio in a hair salon without paying royalties for the songs. Not CDs, THE RADIO!! This is quite possibly the most ridiculous Intellectual Property argument I’ve heard, and there are some doozies!
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Nora, for these first ten months, you have always been sort of lazy, choosing the path that involves the least amount of work. When it was time for you to breast feed, you opted to have the milk extracted for you and, first syringed drop by drop into your mouth, and eventually placed in a bottle. At the moment you’re at least a month behind your contemporaries (our friends’ early 2009 babies) in the area of locomotion. It probably hasn’t helped your progress that you have never liked being on your stomach. Especially ever since you learned to roll over, we barely even have time to snap back-fastening your pajamas closed sometimes.
In my search to rationalize your shortcomings, I’ve come up with a theory:
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Today I stumbled on this awesome speech written and given by Michael Crichton back in 2002 about speculation, and how the media – which he defines as movies, television, internet, books, newspapers, and magazines – is, to a large extent, a gurgling blob of useless drivel. It’s a shame that he probably didn’t get to watch much of the farcical climax of vacuous speculation that was the 2008 US presidential election, as he died on the day Obama got elected. My favorite part of the article is how he talks about the fallacy that we all commit (a recent favorite topic of mine) when we read the newspaper, or receive information from any news source for that matter.
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Yesterday, as I was digging through my coins to pay for a cool European lager, I happened to glance at the artwork on the heads (Or tails? Who can tell anymore?) side of the coin. At first I thought it was some kind of joke currency or bizarre token that someone had slipped me in mistake or trickery. So I saved it, pretty sure it couldn’t be real. But lo and behold, it’s a special 2009 commemorative 2€ coin. To quote the Official Journal of the European Union (PDF):
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Not counting my office, our house has two bedrooms, one large, and the other freakin’ enormous. Ever since moving in, we’ve been sleeping in the smaller of the two for several reasons, the main ones being the gorgeous view and the fact that it’s exterior, with no neighbors’ balconies nearby. When it became clear that we’d be having a third resident in our house, our irrational greed took over and we both agreed that, “There’s no way we’re giving the baby the biggest room in the house! Over our dead bodies!” Actually the whole house would be hers since she’s the sole heir. So we moved into the bigger bedroom, set up the crib in there with the intention of banishing her to the smaller bedroom when the time came, and we lived like this for eight months. Until…
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Last night at eleven o’clock our power went out. I’m unfortunately accustomed to this because our circuit breaker is incredibly weak and about twice a month flips to the off position out of sheer laziness. So I got up to flip it back on, but it was already in the on position. It was at that point that I noticed how dark it was outside the window. After fumbling through the darkness towards the window, I looked out into the blackness. It had been raining with low clouds all day, and there was no light reflecting off the clouds from Colindres, nor from nearby Laredo or Santoña. The entire region was blacked out!
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For my entire life I’ve had to live with a last name that no one pronounces like I do. I’ve lived in four different countries, and practically no one says my name correctly to my ear. There is only one correct way to pronounce “Rasmussen” in American English! Why is it so hard? Because so many Americans don’t understand the pronunciation rules that guide the phonetics of English.
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One thing I learned on my trip to the Bordeaux wine-making region of France is that the vast, vast, vast majority of things said about wine are complete bullshit. The upper end of the wine industry is almost entirely about marketing and branding, and has very little to do with the product. In a blind taste test, I bet that 97% of wine drinking adults can tell the difference between a 1€ bottle of wine and a 15€ bottle of wine. But once you get up to a 15€ bottle of wine (the threshold price might actually be closer to 7€), I bet less than 1% of wine drinking adults can tell the difference between that 15€ bottle and a 50€ or 100€ or 1000€ bottle of wine. There’s just not that much difference!
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I started and finished Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol
Spoiler Alert: I will not discuss any aspects of the plot in this post, nor any of the puzzles that are solved along the way. What I will discuss is thematic elements, particularly as they relate to the “science” in the book. If you want to be completely surprised by everything you read in The Lost Symbol,
