|
|
|
 Engagement I am pleased to announce that Deborah Rinehart and I are engaged to be married. The details may be found at Engagement in an affair of honour.
Modern art as a cold war weapon The ever estimable Anthony R. Lewis has alerted me to an exotic side light of the cold war. An article in The Independent World claims that the CIA subsidized modern art to show that the West was open to artistic creativity in contrast to the constipated artistic sensibility of the communists who were mired in Socialist Realism. According to the article: “Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.”I’m not sure that I’m up for these revelations. I am suspicious though. If I understand the article correctly certain persons have come forward with the story, but it is not supported by documentation. I suppose with the CIA that is the way these things are done – all documents are marked burn before reading. Still, I am open to the possibility that these CIA operatives were actually communist moles who were trying to destry the moral fabric of America. The current expose is an effort to conceal what was really happening. If so, those CIA operatives from yesterday made a major error of judgement. Americans are quite able to destroy their moral fabric all on their own; they never needed help from communist moles. The pencil as a weapon of Mass destruction. According to a UPI story a Massachusettes grade school teacher believes that pencils are materials for building weapons. That sounds right to me; one can build weapons out of almost anything. Could it be that we went to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was importing a suspiciously large number of pencils? NORTH BROOKFIELD, Mass., Nov. 18 (UPI) — A Massachusetts school district superintendent said a memo banning sixth graders from carrying pencils was written without district approval. North Brookfield School District interim Superintendent Gordon Noseworthy said Wendy Scott, one of two sixth-grade teachers at North Brookfield Elementary School, did not get approval from administrators before sending the memo to all sixth-grade parents, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported Thursday. The memo said students would no longer be allowed to bring writing implements to school. It said pencils would be provided for students in class and any students caught with pencils or pens after Nov. 15 would face disciplinary action for having materials “to build weapons.” Noseworthy said the memo does not represent district policy. “We never use words like weapons in this context,” he said. The school’s principal said no ban was being instituted and the situation has been handled.
They’re getting serious about software bugs The standard complaint about software is that there are bugs in the software. The new plan is to fix the problem by putting the software in the bugs. A software team in Hong Kong is working on storing data in bacteria. Can this be a good thing? I foresee disgruntled employees sabotaging corporate data centers with a shot of penicillin and other bizarre consequences.
Busy, busy, busy
As of this writing the washer and dryer have been disconnected from
their plumbing. The point of this exercise is that the floor underneath
can be tiled, some crumbling plaster replaced and painted, an outright
hole in the filled in, and other such finishing touches taken care of.
This is all to be completed by mid December. During that same period of
time I will be spending a few days in Las Vegas watching the NFR, doing
my stint as a rural transit driver, and taking care of my little eleven
pound kitten. Sigh.
This page was last updated November 29, 2010. |
