So I'm going thru my Yahoo! hookahlovers group and I come across a post from a 13-year-old who says his parents have told him he can have his own hookah for his next birthday if he wants, and he's asking how healthy (or unhealthy) it is to smoke the hookah. Also wants to know if anyone makes a hookah with more than four hoses, apparently because four isn't enough for him...
I wrote a response in which I said that, first of all, the health question about the hookah is controversial -- some say it's less health hazardous than cigarettes, others say it isn't, but that regardless, he is much too young to be smoking and needs to wait a few years (and I was being generous with that estimation). Also pointed out rather mildly that apart from it being unwise for someone as young as he is to be smoking, it's also illegal. I didn't address the multiple hose question.
The thing that really got me about this is, no one else on the list said anything about it, and it's a list with over three hundred members. Even the moderator didn't speak up. (Then again, the moderator is himself only 17, so that could be the reason right there.)
He merely responded by re-asking his question about multiple-hose hookahs, and someone else helped him.
I'm childfree and would never call myself a master of parenting skills or anything -- far from it. But even I know better than to give a kid a hookah for his 14th birthday. What's the matter with these people?
Just occurred to me that I mentioned "studying" in my last entry without ever having made an entry about what I'm studying for. I was planning to keep this a secret to surprise Denise with it, but I doubt I'd have ever been able to manage it, so I filled her in on all the details last night.
I'm back on the certification track! *hop hop* I'm now studying once more for my Windows 2000 Server certificate. My test is tentatively scheduled for June 3rd, and I have a study plan all drawn up. Currently, I'm half a day behind because of an installation error with the Windows 2000 Server software on the notebook that I'm using for my studies, but I should be back on schedule this evening. Especially since my mother has once again cancelled dinner due to her continued illness.
Anyway. Next exam is June 3rd, and the next one after that will be sometime in late July, after which I will officially be an MCSA. *furtively knocks on wood*
Arrived in today's mail: the complete second season of Babylon 5 on DVD. To be perused at my pleasure after I've done my studying for the day. (Yes, I do have a modicum of self-control.)
What with one thing and another this weekend, I never did get around to posting those two letters to the editor. So here's a link to the one that got printed today: my response to AID's report on HIV and genital mutilation.
I'll wait a few more days to see if the other one gets printed, but it's not likely... newspapers generally don't like to print too much material from one writer.
In an unrelated story, we read that today is Saddam Hussein's 66th birthday, assuming he's still alive... apparently, there is/has been some concern that this would be a cause for a new attack (from loyalists) in Iraq, but it's kind of hard to believe that anyone would take that idea seriously, and there haven't been any incidents thus far.
Monday morning, 11 AM. I hate Mondays.
Just got an email from the Washington Times telling me that my letter on the circumcision article is going to be printed on Monday. Link will be posted for the interested and/or bored. *grin*
It's been a pretty quiet week overall, which is why I haven't blogged in a while. The only noteworthy event was a phone call from Chad last Sunday... we talked for a bit, not a heck of a lot new is going on with him. Then again, he lives in Akron, so it's hardly surprising that he's not livin' la vida loca.
Two fun articles from today's issue of The Washington Times, one of the two newspapers I read daily (the other one being The Washington Post). I've sent letters to the editor on both of these; if those letters get printed, I'll post links to those as well. (There's a good chance they will; I've been printed in the Times on a number of previous occasions over the past few years.
The United States Agency for International Development finds that male circumcision helps reduce the risk of HIV infection. Yeah, and if every woman had her breasts chopped off at age 18, there'd be no more breast cancer, either.
And here's an editorial supporting Santorum's position on sodomy laws. Aren't the Republicans the ones who are constantly saying they want less governmental intrusion in our day-to-day lives...?
No commentary on this one. From the Wednesday issue of the Washington Times -- both of these articles were on the same page, too, yet. When I read stories like this, I have a hard time understanding how one species can span the spectrum of ethics so thoroughly.
Connecticut: Mother charged in shooting of daughter
NEW HAVEN -- A woman who told police she shot her 7-year-old daughter because she was frustrated with the girl's learning disabilities had sought help from child-welfare officials, but they determined the child was not in imminent danger, a newspaper reported.
Police say Jennifer O'Connor told them she woke up the morning of April 4 and got a glass of water, then went to her room and loaded a rifle she had purchased in February. She then shot the girl, Sara, once in the chest, authorities said.
Sara woke up after she was shot and told her mother she was burning, according to police.
Miss O'Connor said she ran to get some towels, but waited 15 minutes before calling anyone, police said.
Sara died three days later at Yale-New haven Hospital.
Miss O'Connor did not enter a plea Monday during her arraignment on murder charges. She was ordered held on $1 million bond.
West Virginia: Powerball winner gives away $451,000
CHARLESTON -- In the four months since winning Powerball's richest jackpot, Jack Whittaker has given away nearly $451,000 to causes ranging from improving a Little League park to buying a coloring book for every child in West Virginia.
Mr. Whittaker's individual donations range from about $100 to about $100,000 and help both charities and people. His most recent contribution was a $10,000 donation to the Covenant House, a West Virginia charity that develops programs to address social problems with long-term solutions.
He also made three separate $100,000 contributions for seed money to create three new charities.
Most people who know me know how I feel about animal cruelty. If this kid had been, say, eight years old, I'd feel sorry for him... I might even feel sorry for him if he were as much as twelve years old. But at seventeen, he receives no sympathy from me, and I even find myself experiencing a bit of schadenfreude.
Texas: Teen blinded by frog accident
DALLAS -- A teenager was blinded after being struck in the face with a frog shot from a so-called "potato gun".
Daniel Benjamin Berry, 17, was injured when he looked down the barrel of the gun's PVC pipe barrel and was hit in the face by the frog.
A potato gun is made of pipe with one end sealed. A potato is wedged into the open end and a flammable liquid put into a sealed chamber is ignited, launching the object.
Daniel joined a group of teens who were try to shoot a frog from the gun, it misfired [sic]. Daniel looked down the barrel to see what was wrong when the gun went off.
[From The Washington Times, Friday 18 April 2003 edition, page A8.]
Picking up various suppplies at the local Giant grocery store, I wander over to the bathroom cleaning supplies section to get some "Tilex Fresh Shower". They're offering a promotion: a series of music on CD called "Life in Balance". Three different discs exist: "Awakening", "Energizing", and "Dreaming". Bit odd to be offering free music with cleaning supplies, but I suppose I can't knock the gimmick too much: it worked on me, and I bought three bottles, one with each different CD. (Hey, it's not like the stuff is going to spoil, is it?) Turns out the music is actually pretty good. I'll have to rip some this evening.
Pardon me. I'm going to head down to the record store now to pick up some CDs with free "Soft Scrub".
Life is largely routine these days, and I haven't felt like publicly pontificating on any particular subject lately, so I haven't made an entry in a little while. I did want to say this before I get my routine day started though...
I got to the office this morning and fired up my email clients first thing, as I always do. (I use two different email clients at the same time -- it's a long story, but trust me, I've got good reasons for doing that. Anyway.) I received a total of about sixty emails on both of my email accounts...
...and not a single one of them was spam. I'm wondering whether I woke up in a parallel universe or something.
A public "thank you" to my Imzadi for cleaning up after Shaw's mess, which I actually never got to see. As to the "bonk" for Shaw -- since you didn't know about that little glitch in the MT code, I'll refrain this time, but next time you won't have any excuses.
Best get the coffee started and get going on this mass mailing project the boss wants done within the next couple of days or so, so I'm signing off... a big hello to all sentient life-forms in the universe, and to everyone else, the secret is to bang the rocks together, fellas. *grin*
Well, I'm trying to figure out which one I want to do this evening. Here are the options.
1) Bake a loaf of my favorite bread. It's made with pumpkin, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chocolate chips, and it's absolutely incredible stuff (I wish I could take credit for making it so good, but all I do is follow a recipe and use a bread machine).
2) Have a hookah -- and if I have a hookah, then I need to decide on a flavor: either peach (which I've had before and is incredible) or rose (which I've never tried and only have as a free sample from George at his online hookah store. I've been meaning to try it out, along with the olive wood coals, so I can do a review on my Yahoo! hookah lovers' group.
Before anyone asks why I don't do both, since obviously not much effort would be involved... one of the big reasons I enjoy both of these things is the way they make the house smell. I'd like to have one smell or the other, not both.
Well, I woke up at 7:30 AM this morning... very unusual for me on a Sunday. I'm glad I did, though, because I got to enjoy a wonderful Spring morning... it reminded me of those very quiet and crisp still mornings I used to have sometimes when staying with at my grandfather's place in Avon Park, Florida... also of early morning walks I always enjoyed taking in the woods when I was in college. My college was extremely small, only 250 students, and was located in a very isolated section of Vermont, where one who appreciates natural beauty (as I do) feels right at home. How isolated was it? Put it this way: you remember those riots in Los Angeles back when the Rodney King verdict was announced? Those riots had been going on for three days before I heard about them. That was in the days before the Internet, of course, but even so.
I am now currently relaxing with my new First Season Babylon 5 DVDs. I'm currently watching Babylon Squared, the first episode featuring the character Zathras from whom I took my own handle. Just on a lark, I'm watching it with English subtitles in French. I took several years of French and can speak and read it reasonably well, but hearing it spoken tends to give me some trouble, so I'm seeing whether more frequent exposure will increase my skill.
I was reading in this morning's paper that there have been some more demonstrations opposing the war. I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the war in Iraq -- this is one of the very rare instances where I actually don't have an opinion on something, because IMO, both pro-war and anti-war people make so much sense I can't disagree with either side -- but I have to say I'm looking at these war protesters with a certain amount of amusement since there's not much left to protest: the war is essentially over. Even more amusing is thinking back on the pundits, who as little as ten days ago or so were saying that we were stuck in another Vietnam-style "quagmire". Whether one supported the war or opposed it, it's hard to believe that there are people out there who honestly thought that invading Iraq would prove militarily difficult. Come on, folks -- with the possible exception of the Soviet Union at its peak, the present-day United States military is the most powerful fighting force that has ever existed in all of human history, and Iraq is a Third World nation, nowhere near as developed as we are and with less than one-tenth the population we have. A pro-war commentator also offered an interesting observation in one of my daily papers the other day: this is a war in which the invading force is more concerned about the welfare of enemy civilians than the enemy itself is. This author (whose name I can't recall, I apologize) said she was unaware of any other war in history in which this was the case. I'm not, either, but my knowledge of history is not very good.
OTOH, I'm pretty squeamish, to say the least, about attacking a country that never attacked us and didn't appear to have the capacity to attack us, except thru a link to terrorism that it tenuous and dubious at best (of the 19 hijackers on September 11th, for example, none were Iraqis... in fact, 15 were Saudis, as is Osama bin Laden himself, but we're still sucking up to the Saudis as much as we always have -- gee, I wonder why). I agree completely that Hussein had to go, but I have pretty serious reservations about whether this was the way to do it.
Another problem: we justified Gulf War I by saying that Hussein had invaded a sovereign nation in "clear violation of international law". It's hard to see much difference between Hussein invading Kuwait and us invading Iraq, except possibly the moral argument that we're "liberating people from oppression". The thing there is, our own government isn't exactly angelic, either. I agree we have more freedom here than people in most other countries do -- certainly in Hussein's Iraq -- but I can't help but think about the scriptural instruction to remove the rafter from your own eye before tending to the mote in your brother's.
And IMO, if you think the war has nothing to do with oil, you're crazy.
Hmm. I'm not sure where that little rambling came from, but it was fun to write. *grin*
...have been reasonably enjoyable and productive. Yesterday morning did start off a bit shaky. I was an hour late getting to the office because someone decided to attempt suicide by jumping in front of a subway train -- at the Metro Center station, too, of all places. And I had a backlog of work to attend to once I got to the office. The afternoon, though, started to slow down and get mellow, to the point where I even felt up to heading over to Hecht's right after work for their huge Spring Sale. I buy clothes about as often as we have elections (only a slight exaggeration), so this was overdue, as it always is. And knowing myself as I do, I made sure to buy a lot of stuff, because I'm probably not going to make it back in there for at least a year. I bought virtually an entirely new wardrobe, all for only about $150. Not bad.
After that, I had a light dinner -- a slice of pizza, a large salad, and a bottle of water -- before heading back to the apartment to relax with a hookah in front of some reruns of Next Gen (good ones, fortunately). I'm having a good time experimenting with different types of coals, foils, screens, and tobaccos. So far, the Nour charcoal logs seem to be the best. The lemon wood coals burn nicely and are flavorless, but they're a hassle to break apart and light. Olive wood coals burn well and don't need to be broken, but they taste bad. Quick lights are convenient but don't burn hot enough, and they don't last long enough, either. The Nours seem to offer the best compromise on everything: they're pretty easy to break, they take only a few minutes to light, they last about an hour, they burn quite hot, and they don't have any taste to foul up the flavor of the shishah. I'm going to keep experimenting before I'm settled on them for sure, though.
My plan had been to finish my pipe before logging on to IM with Denise, but this Romman tobacco lasts so long that I realized that plan wasn't going to work out, so I started my IM session about ninety minutes into my pipe. Denise doesn't smoke, of course, but was still kind enough to feign interest in the hookah by asking me a bit about different flavors and so on. :^)
My Saturday morning routine is pretty much all set, and I've got the afternoon free. I think I'm going to hang out at the office for a little while and work on the crossword puzzle before I decide whether to go to the movies or just head back to the house. Probably the latter -- I don't feel like dealing with the public today.
Current annoyance: I'm relaxing with the crossword puzzle. I'm one of those people who tends to have difficulty with proper nouns, and while I generally enjoy crosswords, my proper noun problem can cause me to stumble. Case in point: I've been sitting here looking at clue number 84 down: "It was returned to China in 1999." I know what that is, and even where it is, but I had to think about it for over an hour, before I finally remembered (just a minute ago, as I was typing this entry, in fact) that it's "Macau". Damn proper nouns. I hate them.
Well, I have to admit I wasn't expecting this, although I suppose I should have been.
I occasionally request free magazine subscriptions from Free Biz Mag. Typically, I ask for mags on technology, modern society, politics, blah blah blah... well, a few weeks ago, on a lark, I took them up on their offer for a free subscription to the imaginatively-titled "Stuff", sister publication to "Maxim". I wasn't really all that interested, but I thought I'd see what it was about. Big mistake.
This evening I received a telemarketer call, asking me if I had "received and was enjoying my men's magazines". I said I'd gotten my first issue a few days ago but hadn't read it yet (only looked it over briefly). She said that was fine, and told me they were going to send me "a special video" as a thank you for subscribing. At this point, I began to sense what was going on, mainly because she didn't tell me the title or nature of the video.
"OK, just to confirm, can I please ask you your age?" Err, 34, I said, sensing what was coming...
"Well, that's great! As a thank you for subscribing, we're going to give you sixty full months of subscriptions to a wide variety of magazines for only four dollars a month. We'll be sending you Penthouse, High Society, Hustler, Cheri, Oui, FHM...."
At which point I politely interrupted the young lady and told her that I did not have any particular interest in that kind of publication and hung up.
Hmm. Anyone want a free subscription to "Stuff"? Just give me the address to send it to.
From the Star Trek species quiz that Denise gave on her blog. No big surprises here. I've always thought of myself as kind of being half Betazoid, half Vulcan, so it's not surprising that they came in at number two and three respectively. Trill, though... I'll have to think that one over a bit more.
Please note that I've taken the liberty of using the correct spelling of "Ferengii", as opposed to the one used on that site. *sniffs haughtily*
#1 Trill
#2 Betazoid
#3 Vulcan
#4 Human
#5 Bajoran
#6 Andorian
#7 Ferengii
#8 Cardassian
#9 Romulan
#10 Klingon
...Rather than doing the links first when I get home tonight, which was my original plan, I think I'll go thru the code and try to figure out why the hell the text is coming out so damn big... it's not my browser setting, I checked...
Heya, everybody. Guess I'd better make an entry before the comment count gets too far ahead of the entry count. *grin*
Thanks again to Denise for setting up this space for me. Xanga sucks exceptionally large rocks, and I'm glad to be away from it. I also like the idea of sharing web space with my partner. :^) OTOH, I now have no excuse not to have a rather heavily customized blog, do I... ah, well. You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Things at the office are getting exceptionally quiet again -- it's that time of year. We don't have much business or activity going on during the Summer, so I tend to occupy myself with other matters. Now that it's getting quiet again and I may actually be about to convince my boss to upgrade our server, I think I'll start using my free time at the office to pursue my Windows 2000 Server certificate. Once I get that, I'll be only one test away from my MCSA. I was doing certs for a while last year but stopped because I found myself acquiring skills that I promptly began losing thru disuse. Not good, especially considering how much time and effort (not to mention money) goes into getting those certs.
Had an interesting email exchange today with Bob Lewis about ethics and corporations -- in his most recent InfoWorld column, he explained that corporations are amoral entities, and we ended up in a very protracted discussion about that. Between his study of ethology and mine of philosophy, it was a fascinating and entertaining mental exercise.
The other fun of the day was an elevator ride, of all things... I got on the elevator with another man and we began to wait for the doors to close. Finally, he pointed his finger at the door and said, "SHAZAM!" -- whereupon the doors obediently shut. He grinned at me. "That's a prime example of post hoc, ergo propter hoc," he said. I agreed that it was, and we talked philosophy for a bit. I actually find myself hoping that I'll bump into him again. He told me that he's a techie, so it may be a good opportunity for -- *shudder* -- networking.