Tales from Uncle Mike

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Spoilers - Who Dies? What Happens? If you are one of the 12 people who isn't infatuated with J.K. Rowling's little Brit warlock, Harry Potter, you can click above to get the general upshot of the ending of the seventh and last book (besides the inevitable graphic novels, comics, cartoon shows and online game). Basically, a whole bunch of minor characters and all the villains get killed off. Oh, and a couple of sidekicks, including an owl. Apparently, Rowling also kills off quite a few teachers and kids at the Hogwart's Satanic School for the Precociously Possessed. The books may have gotten progressively darker, but fear no philosophical abyss; the prose remains 8th-grade level in both vocabulary and morality, and justice is dealt out with TV movie probity. The saddest finality is that, with the end of the series, the movies will no longer provide employment for every Equity union actor in the UK.

Here you'll find the Associated Press fact piece on an obscure American legislative process that will take place once again, due to Dubya's most recent shameless desecration of the Constitution. It's a nice little "Q&A" article that, to its journalistic credit, manages to avoid the question "What the flippin' f%$@ is going on in this country?" Contempt of Congress: What Is It? After reading the article, one realizes that no matter who does or does not testify, whatever the result, Dubya (supposes that) he has the power to simply nullify the consequences via executive dictat. Should we expect otherwise?

"I Take the iPhone Home" - TIME : "The iPod was the accessory of the hip cognoscenti. Will the pricey, sought-after iPhone become a mere status symbol, the kind of thing that marks you as an overpaid Wall Street jerkwad?" Answer: Yes

There are a lot of ways to tie the beginnings of Christianity to the rites of pagan sun worship that came before. This video points out a lot of those ways. But since it's set to The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun", even if you think it's blasphemy, it's still quite pleasant.

Democrats dismayed by Siegelman sentence The former governor of Alabama and the former CEO of HealthSouth were both sentenced to 6+ years in prison for their collusion in fraud and bribery. Since the governor is a Democrat and was previously exonerated in a Federal corporate fraud trial, some people are claiming the involvement of Karl Rove and his gang. Regardless of who was responsible, I am glad to see that we are getting serious about corruption. In addition to the expeditionary imperialism, blind nationalism and cultural malaise that has destroyed every empire on Earth, the most immediate threat to our liberty is the corruption that exists in the synergy between corporations and government. When a young couple gets in debt over their heads, they lose the freedom to make certain choices. It destroys many marriages, insidiously, by shackling people and forcing them into despair. Consumer lending has grown into a malicious, seductive Medusa, luring in the susceptible with promise...

A quick search on my favorite bittorrent site, Demonoid , reveals a whole bunch of well-seeded copies of Michael Moore's newest expose documentary " Sicko ". Quelle surprise! When I first heard that the Feds were threatening to seize all copies, due to Moore's visit to Cuba during the making of the film, and that Moore had 'secreted a copy away off-shore', I just knew the screener copy would be, oh, accidentally left lying around. Maybe in the mailbox of someone with a DVD drive in their home computer and a cable modem. Michael Moore is anything but stupid. He knows that he is more than a profit center for a film company. He realizes that the best way to both protect and promote his movie is to give it away to the public. Kind of like using the US Mail to safeguard something by sending it to yourself via China. Except in this case, he effectively emailed it to everyone in the world. This is just my theory, of course. He also realizes, like all new-mar...

We are not saving time. We are only changing it. We are shaping time, all the time, with technology and its effect on our perception. Before the first mechanical clock ticked its first 'tock', a second was only a concept. Everyone might agree that a second is roughly equivalent to a moment, but how long is that? As Einstein pointed out, a moment with a pretty girl does not seem nearly as long, relatively speaking of course, as a moment sitting on top of a hot oven. Songs about trains and cowboys, about ships and sailing, stories about long journeys, all resonate with a past in which time moved differently. Communication was not ubiquitous and immediate, and travel required an involvement with the land. Relationships formed more slowly and, if they prospered at all, strengthened by the necessity mandated by a smaller world. One cannot afford to burn too many bridges if one lives on an island. Our expectations of instantaneous gratification, immense global change and a society ...

Read about Dubya's recent breakdown here , in which he beats his chest and chants " I am the President!". Maybe someday we'll read that he had himself injected with amphetamines and kept suicide pills handy, too. Bunker mentality will do that to a guy. Rather than offer my own opinion about our Commander-Guy in Chief and his lack of tolerance for dissension, I will quote a former President, Theodore Roosevelt. “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country.” “To announce there must be no criticism of the President, and to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, it is morally treas onous to the American public.”

I posted here back in March about my experience with salmonella poisoning by peanut butter, and my outrage at finding out that the FDA had cut food plant inspections by 66% under the watch of that monkey-lipped ass-hat in the White House. Today I read that the Chinese have convicted the former head of their own Food and Drug Administration for accepting bribes and allowing fake or bad food and drug products into the market. The sentence? Death. If American public and private officials were held to the same level of accountability as the day care workers and crack dealers in this country, maybe there wouldn't be so much stupidity and corruption in the halls of executive power.

Charlie Brooker is my new hero. That says more about me than it does about him.

I do not accept non-nature based belief systems. In other words, I accept as truth only that which is quantifiable and observable. Speculation and postulation about spirits, ghosts or some spectral intelligence which, no matter what the argument, sits at a meta-level unknowable to humans is, to me, simply a waste of time. If it will not change the temperature of the room or cause a chemical or physical reaction in matter, it does not concern me. The stock in trade of those who deal in matters spiritual seems to be faith in things unseen and a world of possibilities. Maybe there is a God. Maybe God is inside us. Maybe we are all God. Maybe God is just another intelligent being like us, who created us as an experiment. If we humans ever create a digital machine or network with even the most rudimentary ability to question, to think laterally in a cloud of fuzzy logic like we humans do, surely it will encounter the same fundamental metaphysical quandaries. Who created me? Why am I...

Let's say a guy named Roger is attracted to a woman named Elaine. He asks her out to a movie; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A few nights later he asks her out to dinner, and again they enjoy themselves. They continue to see each other regularly, and after a while neither one of them is seeing anybody else. And then, one evening when they're driving home, a thought occurs to Elaine, and, without really thinking, she says it aloud: ''Do you realize that, as of tonight, we've been seeing each other for exactly six months?'' And then there is silence in the car. To Elaine, it seems like a very loud silence. She thinks to herself: Geez, I wonder if it bothers him that I said that. Maybe he's been feeling confined by our relationship; maybe he thinks I'm trying to push him into some kind of obligation that he doesn't want, or isn't sure of. And Roger is thinking: Gosh. Six months. And Elaine is thinking: But, hey, I'm not so sure I...

I recently had an exchange with a coder/developer concerning his hack for displaying a " label cloud " on Blogger sites. You can read our mutual comments here . Before seeing the replies from phydeaux3 , I had already spoken to my business partner about the concerns in the commercial sector about open source in general, and the use of such weighty packages as Joomla in particular. Sure, the code is free, constantly updated, infinitely configurable, and often comparable to commercial applications. Sometimes there really is no commercial equivalent in any affordable sense, as in the case of Content Management Systems such as Mambo and Drupal . But the issue of support and ongoing development makes business owners crazy. They are used to the model of buying Microsoft software and paying a premium for both the code and all the collateral stuff necessary to support it: books, tutorials, classes and the MS certified geeks to keep it running. All that is standardized and avai...

What is Web 2.0? Well, apparently, whatever it is, it comes with spacey new-age music. Watch and learn.

I met a girl not long ago and tried to make her fall in love with me. It didn't work. This morning I ate a raspberry tart I had planned to serve for dessert when she came for dinner. It was delicious, and I thought "This would have worked magic on her. She would have fallen for me, if she had eaten this." Then I was doubly glad that I had eaten it instead of her.

I tried to use my T-mobile phone to automatically post to my blog, and this is the best (?) I could come up with. It sent the whole album page for the picture. Anyway, this is my dad. This is the only recent picture of him. We should take some together. View more photos from mikeburtner@gmail.com Hello (mikeburtner@gmail.com) wanted to share this great T-Mobile camera phone photo with you! - Leave a comment on my photo

 

I was searching YouTube for this video that I made with my webcam, to see if anyone had watched it. Here is what I found out. There have been 190 views of this video. There are also literally thousands of other webcam videos that look remarkably like mine. And there are over 50 of cats or kittens named "Grace" or "Gracie". I feel like such a dork.

A recent study , from a sampling of college students nationwide, finds that they tested higher on the Narcissistic Personality Index than previous generations. I am, admittedly, at odds with most of my friends over this very issue. A lot of people rebel against the way they were raised, and I am no exception. But after many years, I came to appreciate being raised with an almost casual indifference to my hopes and goals, being raised to understand that life is hard, short and brutal, and totally up to me, if it is to be any different. I was not praised because I was precocious and intelligent: I was told to apply myself or I would end up at the factory like my dad. We were not allowed to go anywhere we wanted, spend hours on the phone, talk or dress like the kids on TV, and basically have our own "lifestyle". We had rules that were arbitrary and designed mostly for our parents' peace of mind. And there's nothing wrong with that. Here's a quote: Twenge, the ...

"I don't even know where to begin." That's what a lot of people say when they are so mad, they don't know how to express it completely, rationally. Anger has a way of taking over your body, and in this case, my body is very much the issue. Let me say this first: I am a Libertarian, an atheist, a citizen and a patriot. When I say 'patriot', I don't mean in the current, jingoistic sense of 'nationalist idiot'. I mean that I love my country. I love what America stands for, the ideals and promises we keep safe for future generations. The Civil War makes me deeply sad. In my opinion, it is a wound that has never healed, and has kept us from being the great Nation envisioned by those who came before. I hate the word 'atheist'. But it is the most sharp division I can make, without going through a lengthy and probably futile explanation of a worldview that excludes the possibility (and the necessity) of supernatural explanations for natu...