Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008) is the third in the Librarian series of stories concerning a secret library, or museum collection, of insanely dangerous artifacts, and the guy in charge of it. Shouldn’t he be known as the Curator? The Director? The Too-Smart Guy?

This time around we’re visiting charming New Orleans, in search of the purpose of life. This appears to be, in the Librarian’s case, being the Librarian and not getting the girl.

And searching for the chalice of Judas Iscariot, because drinking from it restores the humanity of, ah, vampires. Wait, why does the museum need it? Anyways, the Librarian’s girl is a vampire who is desperate to be good, and after 400 years of life, she’s a bit tired, although it’s not explained why she doesn’t just take an afternoon walk and dissolve in a whirlwind of glowing particles.

So there’s plenty of adventure, but the theme, which seems to be Fulfill your destiny! is dubious. If the purpose of life is to fulfill your destiny, then why bother? It all becomes a deterministic and muddled mess, devaluing free will and making watching the movie a depressing exercise in some philosopher’s sordid assertions concerning existence. Unlike, say, the moral conundrums of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

This story is sort of fun, if you’re not thinking about it too much, but you won’t remember it the next day. It asks a question about life, but it’s not an intriguing, challenging answer.

And if the purpose of life is to devote ourselves to Bo-bo-bo-ob Newhart….

This is actually a bit late – Nov 18 of 2024 – but the nomination has a nasty observation at the end.

Oklahoma’s superintendent of public education can’t require schools to show students a video of him praying for Donald Trump and condemning teachers’ unions, the state attorney general’s office said.

The state superintendent, Ryan Walters, emailed the bizarre video to school district superintendents last week, saying his office was requiring the video be shown to students and shared with parents, as well. Talk about self-absorption. [MSNBC, Ja’han Jones]

This is along with various abrogations of the rule against endorsement of religion, and an ideological test for incoming teachers. Getting the President’s attention requires non-stop work, y’all.

How did all that work out for Mr Walters? Oklahoma was rated in education … 50th out of 51st, with New Mexico the only State/entity ranked worse. Significantly, the excuses began immediately from Mr Walters (same article from KOCO News):

“A lot of these are kind of ridiculous,” Walters said. “They love to take into account how much money we put into education. That’s never been an evaluation of mine of what makes a good education system — it’s outcomes.”

Sure, if the rating was on ideology then he’d be doing great. But teaching ideology in school only sounds good until you consider an ideology you don’t like. Then, like forbidding endorsements, implicit and explicit, of sects by government, it becomes sensible not to teach ideologies.

No matter how much it might appeal to President Trump.

So what’s happening with Mr Walters?

Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters announced Wednesday that he would step down from his role overseeing the state’s schools to lead the conservative group Teacher Freedom Alliance, saying, “We’re going to destroy the teachers unions.”

The announcement from Walters, a conservative Republican who pushed to incorporate teaching about the Bible into public school classrooms, caps off a contentious tenure marked by a willingness to embrace culture war issues.

Oh, isn’t he adorable? Destroy teachers unions.

I suggest the unions not take the bait. Instead, welcome the Teacher Freedom Alliance (TFA) to the great war of, well, teaching kids. State that you look forward to working with them, will invite them to conferences, etc. It gives TFA three choices: run around screaming like lunatics while ignoring the invite; go to the conferences and run around screaming like lunatics; or be adults and discard the demonization of teachers’ unions.

My guess is that Mr Walters, being one of those folks who think culture warriors are important, will go with the first option and discover, too late, that the public wants effective education, and that the unions are acceptable so long as they facilitate … education.

Dune: Part Two (2024) continues the long slog of the Dune epic, in this one portraying the conversion of Paul Atreides, the son of the murdered leader of House Atreides, to the ways of the fremen, the inhabitants and rightful owners of Arrakis, the desert planet otherwise known as Dune.

And it’s entertaining … but not memorable. I saw it maybe a month ago, and I had to go look for reminders of the plot. And then it still didn’t come back vividly.

It just doesn’t really work for me. Then again, neither did the novel, which puts me off in a distinct minority, I know. But there it is. I can watch for the visuals, and appreciate the well-portrayed scene, but after that, it’s not so much.

Let me talk about that a little bit. As I recall, this movie has the scene where the head of House Harkonnen, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, tests his heir apparent by having him duel with prisoners who are members of Atreides. The focus is just about all Harkonnen, yet Atreides is the underdog here, and a focus on them might have made it more memorable. Instead, it almost feels pre-ordained.

That’s always boring. When the Divine says things will happen this way, there’s little to learn from the actions of the fictional mortals.

If Dune’s your thing, go for it. It’s not a shabby effort at all. It just doesn’t work for me.

This caught me by surprise:

This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage. …

But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil. [“Illiteracy is a policy choice,” Kelsey Piper, The Argument]

The report says … has seen [Mississippi] climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally.

Mississippi ninth? Sounds like a miracle – in fact, some call it the Mississippi Miracle – but, like most big improvements, the lessons learned need to be distributed so all young Americans can benefit. Will they?

Our legislators who pursue this must keep in mind that a lot of professionals in the field will have an investment of some sort – generally prestige, along with NIH (Not Invented Here) and even financial – in other methods than that pursued by recently improving States. Add to that the determined demonization of the education labor unions by the right, such as the libertarians, and the political landscape may be dotted with mountain lions, which will discourage the career politician.

But this is why we hire politicians, to get the job done. I hope Americans can find such politicians.

Via Ars Technica:

New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42 percent of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82 percent of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3. …

“Cultural missteps in high-consequence settings can derail negotiations, damage relationships, and reinforce stereotypes,” the researchers write. For AI systems increasingly used in global contexts, that cultural blindness could represent a limitation that few in the West realize exists.

For us provincial types, other cultures have radically different ways of getting business done, and if you don’t know that, or arrogantly don’t care, failure will be your lot on the venture.

This emphasizes where AI may be a weak addition to the quiver of arrows.

Here’s Wikipedia’s page on taarof.

Metabolomics:

Metabolomics is the scientific study of chemical processes involving metabolites, the small molecule substrates, intermediates, and products of cell metabolism. Specifically, metabolomics is the “systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind”, the study of their small-molecule metabolite profiles. The metabolome represents the complete set of metabolites in a biological cell, tissue, organ, or organism, which are the end products of cellular processes. Messenger RNA (mRNA), gene expression data, and proteomic analyses reveal the set of gene products being produced in the cell, data that represents one aspect of cellular function. Conversely, metabolic profiling can give an instantaneous snapshot of the physiology of that cell, and thus, metabolomics provides a direct “functional readout of the physiological state” of an organism. There are indeed quantifiable correlations between the metabolome and the other cellular ensembles (genome, transcriptome, proteome, and lipidome), which can be used to predict metabolite abundances in biological samples from, for example mRNA abundances. One of the ultimate challenges of systems biology is to integrate metabolomics with all other -omics information to provide a better understanding of cellular biology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “What researchers suspect may be fueling cancer among millennials,” Ariana Eunjung Cha, Álvaro Valiño and Dan Keating, WaPo:

[Professor Gary Patti of Washington University School of Medicine] in St. Louis team is focused on metabolomics — the vast, largely unmapped study of the small molecules coursing through the human body. Using high-resolution mass spectrometry and custom-built computational tools, Patti’s lab has developed a system capable of scanning a single blood sample for tens of thousands of chemicals at once.

President Trump at the big military meeting in Virginia:

During a 71-minute speech to senior military leaders in Quantico, Virginia, President Donald Trump suggested that the military use “dangerous cities as training grounds.” [CNN/Politics]

It’s like watching somebody suggest to a rocket engineer that launching a rocket would be so much easier using a trebuchet.

Well, I suppose this is still better than blowing everyone up at the meeting as a way to get rid of all those old-timers, invalidated with their outdated ideas concerning how to run things.

Steve Benen provides a quote from Truth Social so I don’t have to visit that site:

In a semi-coherent 232-word rant published to his social media platform, the president described [The New York Times] as “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” adding that the outlet “has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!).”

“(ME!)“? Does the author, presumably Mr Trump, have doubts that his readers will actually not understand that their favorite President is Mr Trump?

Or is the President, aware his piss-poor policies are making him less popular than the liberals, feeling that he needs to remind them of their loyalties?

Or maybe he just figures everyone else has the same dementia he has.

For those readers who’ve seen one or more episodes of the TV series Horrible Histories (2009), a Scholastic Productions product intended for the child demographic that sought to teach history through farce, the movie Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans (2019) is an extension. Employing over-emphasis and characterizations potentially irritating to adults, it portrays Nero in Rome, and a Roman legion facing Queen Boudica in England, with a hapless Roman who is banished to that legion, and how he survives, at least for a while, in the land of barbarians, some of whom are in his own legion.

If it’s to your taste, great! We made it through the series with laughter, but the movie was a bit much. So enjoy it if you can.

In case you were wondering whether vaccines benefit society …

The covid-19 vaccines cost $79 billion to develop and deliver globally, but provided health and economic benefits worth between $5 trillion and $38 trillion globally in the first year alone, based on avoided infections, hospitalisations and deaths. That is a return on investment of between $60 and $475 per dollar invested. [“Covid-19 vaccine benefits worth up to $38 trillion in first year alone,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (20 September 2025, paywall)

Fascinating.

While random reading I ran across this in “From ‘Tractors’ to Cell Therapy Clinics: Unproven Medical Procedures,” Curtis E. Margo, Skeptical Inquirer (September/October 2025, paywall) …

[Historian James Harvey Young (1915–2006) ] named the chapter [in The Toadstool Millionaires] featuring Elisha Perkins “Galvanizing Trumpery.” He created this memorable pun by linking the dual meanings of the verb to galvanize with the word trumpery from fifteenth-century French (tromperie, “to deceive”), which later in English would come to mean “worthless” and “of no or little value.”

I’m not sure this is a pun, although the subject, Mr Perkins, was engaged in electricity-related scamming (in the late 18th century), and galvanizing has an electricity-related definition, also known as electrogalvanizing.

But that is beside the point, which is really below me, but it being a Saturday morning a bit of humor is in order, and if it’s at the expense of proponents of uninhibited wealth-pursuit, so much the better.

Wondering what to make of ‘social influencers?’ Here’s Maya Sulkin at The Free Press:

[Sophie] Cohen said she’s now living the life of her dreams. “I make a great living. It’s a dream lifestyle. I fully work for myself.” She used to be embarrassed to admit her job was “content creation,” but not anymore. “It has become this very aspirational career, because there’s all the glamour of it, like the events and the free stuff. But I think the biggest luxury is not having to work a nine-to-five. And I think, in this day and age, for many young people, that’s what they want to be doing.” …

Influencers make money in two ways. First, companies pay them to promote products or brands. And second, as influencers accumulate followers—and begin to attract advertising—they are paid a percentage of the ad revenue.

Is it any wonder that so many Gen Zers want to be influencers?

I’d call them ‘celebrities,’ folks who are glamorous  because they exist, not because they’ve achieved something impressive. The entire thought that mere existence, and I do mean mere, makes you great.

It’s a repugnant recipe for running a life, it seems to me, and I don’t think they get it. Yet. Age, that wicked devil, has one more trick to play on you: afflicting you with wisdom only in your old age.

And when it comes to Jimmy Kimmel, another cave-in has occurred:

The blackout of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is over.

Sinclair and Nexstar, the two major station groups that preempted the talk show earlier this month, are allowing the show to return to their ABC-affiliated stations on Friday evening.

This means that Kimmel will be seen again in major cities like Washington, DC, Nashville, and Seattle, as well as several dozen other markets. [CNN/Business]

And why? In this tense political atmosphere, it’s hard to say if this is to be trusted :

Some affiliates of both Nexstar and Sinclair had been inundated with calls from frustrated Kimmel fans in recent days.

Believable, at least.

Andrew Sullivan is caught on the horns of a smelly dilemma:

The difference between Kimmel and the rest, of course, is that Kimmel is on a broadcast network, which is supposed to serve the “public interest” and is subject to government licensing. And what those networks have done these last few years — especially in late night — has been to become aggressive, partisan opponents of Trump and MAGA and subsequently, much more unforgivably, craven apologists — and even propagandists, in the case of Colbert — for Biden. They decided to cater to only one half of the country, and relentlessly mock, ridicule, and demonize the other half. Johnny Carson, they ain’t.

From what little I’ve read, the motivations of shooter Tyler Robinson are not at all clear. He was brought up in gun culture. That’s precious little to go on.

For Sullivan, though….

But the tit-for-tat is at Orbán levels now, with state institutions directly canceling private entities. That is a difference in kind, not degree. It’s where cancel culture becomes outright authoritarianism. FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s mob-like threats against broadcast networks this week — we can do this “the easy way or the hard way” — were pure Budapest. Nexstar needs FCC blessing for a merger, so within hours of Carr’s encouragement, they and their 60 affiliate stations balked at Kimmel’s lie. Disney, faced with losing 40 percent of a late-night audience that had already declined by almost half in 2025, swiftly caved.

And the Trump right isn’t coy or shy about any of this. They love cancel culture, they now declare, and want the state to be fully involved in it. The leverage is federal and immense: funds for universities and schools, contracts with law firms, IRS and DOJ investigations of critics, ICE arrests of immigrant students for criticizing Israel, visa revocations for the ideologically problematic, and now open threats to broadcast licenses if they don’t please Trump.

In Sullivan’t view, if Trump frightens you, the alternative is hardly better. Which is an echo of my own wish that both political parties lose and disband, preferably in 2026, as these two parties have become corrupted by arrogance.

Consider this Earl’s arrogance and self-importance, and then get back to me. I’ll try to hose you off.

Well, there’s nothing like advocating for the abrogation of the Constitution in defense of a corrupt felon to get you a nomination for the Earl Landgrebe award:

An Arizona Republican lawmaker on Wednesday called for the execution of a Democratic congresswoman because she urged people upset with President Donald Trump to protest in the streets.

Kingman[, Arizona] Republican Rep. John Gillette wrote on the social media site X that U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington, was calling for the the government to be overthrown and should be hanged.

“Until people like this, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government are tried convicted and hanged.. it will continue,” Gillette said in response to a video of Jayapal. [AZ Mirror]

Note that Mr Gillette is a Representative in the Arizona House of Representatives.

And maybe Jayapal did?

The post Gillette responded to claimed that Jayapal was making a call to violence because she said protesters should be “strike ready” and “street ready.” The Arizona Mirror watched the video in its entirety and found no calls to violence or advocating for overthrowing the government; it was focused on “non-violent resistance” to Trump and advising people on how to do that.

Yeah, this sounds more like an attention-craving move, which makes it twice as bad.

Pentad:

A group or set of five things or elements.

EXAMPLES

• The pentad of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and spirit.
• In linguistics, a pentad might refer to the five key aspects of a narrative.
• During the presentation, we focused on a pentad of essential marketing strategies.

[Vocab Dictionary]

Noted in “Everybody wants your 5-star rating. Even your cardiologist.” Ashley Fetters Maloy, WaPo:

Sometimes what’s irksome is the sheer audacity. One X user described a delivery guy rooting around in her garage then asking for a five-star review; another was put off by a waiter who asked for one despite reeking of cigarette smoke. Many people have revealed their policies of giving negative reviews when asked specifically for positive ones or using surveys to complain about surveys; some describe feeling harassed or badgered, even bribed or quid pro quo’d into giving their experience the full pentad of approval. I, for one, remember that years ago a WaveRunner tour company in New Jersey withheld souvenir photos — me and each of my bridesmaids breezing past the Statue of Liberty, naturally — until I had left a five-star review on Google that mentioned the staffer who had asked for it by name.

Unlike Parkinson’s disease, I do not know anyone who has Huntington’s Disease, a genetic problem which results in various neurological problems, with no cure.

And there’s still no cure, but according to this report, it appears a fairly effective, and expensive, cure has been discovered.

Once a way to fix a problem is discovered, the cost can often be optimized away. Hurray for the Brits!

Cryostat:

The word cryostat is a word of compound meaning from the roots cryo, which means cold, and stat, which means static or stationary. A cryostat is an instrument used to sustain very low temperatures at -238 degrees Fahrenheit (-150 Celsius) or below, for many medical, engineering, and scientific uses. The chemicals to maintain these temperatures are baths of liquid helium for tissue specimens or liquid nitrogen for cryonics patients. The inner vessel of a cryostat is similar in construction to a vacuum flask; and there is a precision cutting instrument for sectioning tissues known as a microtome inside the freezer portion of the cryostat. [All the Science]

Noted in “Quantum device detects all units of electricity at once,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, NewScientist (30 August 2025, paywall):

This integration was challenging because both devices rely on fragile quantum phenomena that can only be observed at very low temperatures – so low they must be operated in special fridges called cryostats. Traditionally, one device also required a magnetic field that disrupted the operation of the other.

Yeah, that entire title just left me baffled, and the content was no help.

The goat entrail this time around yields unsurprising results, as Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) succeeds her late father, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), in Arizona’s House seat in Arizona District 7. The late Representative was reelected 63.4%-36.6% in 2024 in a total of 271,000 votes; his daughter outdid him, 70.7%-27.5% from a total of 82,000 votes, the latter percentage being for Daniel Butierez (R-AZ), who does not list any relevant political experience.

As we know, special elections are a challenge to interpret, or perhaps a path of good intentions. Still, the newly minted Representative, who lists no relevant experience, did well.

A bit more detail about the Waffle House Index:

Without claiming any credit from sending this letter, I see Disney’s caved to, well, probably their customer base, according to The Hollywood Reporter:

Jimmy Kimmel is getting back on the air. …

“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” ABC parent The Walt Disney Co. said in a statement Monday. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

I’ve seen reports of Disney’s customers canceling subscriptions in droves, but nothing official. And, if true, it’d be disappointing that it was the clompclompclomp of customer feet that drove them to retract an action plausibly, but not officially acknowledged, taken in response to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr’s remarks, rather than principle. But at least it least it happened.

There’s more to this story. Let me clarify that Disney, Paramount, Artists United, all of these studios and news sources and whathaveyou, exist because of principle, a principle embedded in the First Amendment of the United States that defines and defends the right to speech uninhibited by government, whether it be speech or press. The symmetrical part of that principle is that those who benefit from it, Disney, et al, must also defend it when someone tries to take advantage of their governmental position to inhibit that speech. Why? For the thoroughly practical reason that most, even all of them cannot continue to exist if that principle ceases to be applied. When your existence depends on whim, you don’t exist, you merely survive – if lucky.

The next question, then, is the next move by Skydance, who bought ABC, parent to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Will they, too, rescind the impending closure of The Late Show? Or are they not as vulnerable to customer desertion as Disney? And how loudly will Erick Erickson scream if the closure is rescinded? He was rather certain it was all about the losses ABC was allegedly suffering at the time. Too bad I can’t find the post in question.

Some fall pics for relaxation:

WaPo is reporting as breaking news that the nominee for U.S. Attorney  of the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik S. Siebert, has resigned:

A top federal prosecutor in Virginia has resigned amid pressure from the Trump administration over his decision not to seek indictments against two of the president’s political foes, three people familiar with the matter said.

U.S. Attorney Erik S. Siebert, in the Eastern District of Virginia, submitted his resignation as the head of that office Friday evening, the people said, moments after President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office: “I want him out.”

Siebert was, of course, nominated by Trump. I wonder if this is the same as withdrawing the nomination, or if there’s a nuance I’m missing.

The rub here is that even a U.S. Attorney can end up in prison if they are caught and convicted of abusing their office. I don’t know Mr Siebert’s qualifications, and as he hadn’t been confirmed, there’s no news from the Senate as to same, but it appears that he knows enough about the law not to venture into a self-destructive disaster.

Trump, like any child, didn’t take well this news:

… a recent determination Siebert made that there was insufficient evidence to pursue a mortgage fraud indictment against New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), according to four people familiar with that investigation. Siebert also declined to prosecute former FBI director James B. Comey based on allegations lodged by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, two people familiar with that inquiry said.

And it’s worth noting that everyone against Siebert aren’t putting their liberty at risk, isn’t it?

Among those pushing for Siebert to be fired was Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who has accused several of the president’s prominent adversaries, including James, of committing mortgage fraud, according to people familiar with the matter. They added that Ed Martin, the Justice Department official who is overseeing criminal investigations based on Pulte’s allegations, also pushed for Siebert to be removed.

Along with a President whose Republican-wing SCOTUS-bestowed immunity will presumably protect him as well. So we see the profound foolishness the decision in Trump v. United States.

This is perhaps more important than the persistent failures of the nominee for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. She seems to just be a clown occupying an important position. Such is the fate of media personalities, and applies to social influencers just as much as conservative TV hosts.

Steve Benen expresses discomfort at the self-importance of the conservatives when it comes to rule of law:

Not surprisingly, voters on the left weren’t exactly eager to endorse indifference to the rule of law: 11% of Democratic voters and an identical number of voters who describe themselves as liberals said presidents should put side rules and laws.

But on the right, it was a different story: 36% of Republican voters, 38% of voters who backed Donald Trump and 40% of “very conservative” voters all expressed support for a president “willing to break some rules and laws to set things right.”

I use self-importance because these conservatives consider their views to be more important than the rule of law, of their fellow, and co-equal, citizens.

And, oddly enough, it reminds me of the behavior of the transgender advocates. As I’ve mentioned before, their failure was to not put their issue, and their views on it, up for debate, but rather impose their views, via the law, on their fellow citizens.

This is in violation of one of the most basic tenets of liberal democracy, that of not imposing arbitrary regulations sans debate upon the citizenry.

The arrogance of both sides continue, to the great destruction of the American polity. Will the independents figure it out and force it out? How about MAGA, which must seek redemption?

Gammon:

Gammon meat is cured, salted meat from the hind legs of a pig.

During processing, a ton of salt is added to pull moisture out. This allows the bacon meat to cure, dry safely, and develop different flavors. [CarnivoreStyle]

New one on me. Another source suggests it’s mostly a UK and Irish word. Noted in this video, in the promotional section.