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Knoxify’s Friday Five

Knoxify is an excellent example of hyperlocal group blogging. The site has a beautiful design with a pleasant balance of photos and words with easy navigation to relevant information. The topic matter is Knoxville, TN and the articles always well written. To make Knoxify even better, they’ve introduced First Friday Five to feature the wonderful non-profits in Knoxville and encourage the Knoxify readers to donate $5 to the organization.

For their first First Friday Five, Knoxify choose one of my favorite non-profits, FISH Hospitality Pantries. FISH provides food and basic staples to any person or family in Knoxville who needs it with no questions asked. People of all economic backgrounds can find themselves in tight economic positions and FISH exists to make sure that no one goes hungry. Well chosen Knoxify!

Chattanooga also has First Friday Five.

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I don’t understand tea bagging.

Apparently on April 15 from 3pm-6pm, Republicans and Conservatives alike (perhaps Democrats and other parties) will be meeting at the World’s Fair Park for some tea bagging. As much as I enjoy a good protest, this just doesn’t sound like my kind of thing:

Teabagging is … an erotic activity used within the context of BDSM and male dominance, with a dominant man teabagging his submissive partner, either a woman or a man, as one variation of facesitting and/or as a means of inflicting erotic humiliation. [Source, Wikipedia, Teabagging]

Just sounds like someone’s going to get themselves arrested.

See also: Teabagging Congress.

Update 12April2009: Seen on The Huffington Post- “Tea Bagging” Rallies Ruthlessly Mocked On Maddow Show

Update: From Paul Krugman:

the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. [Source, The New York Times, Tea Parties Forever ]

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Let’s talk about breasts

I have 5 finicky eaters and 3 pounds of thawed chicken breasts. I could go with my old fallback Cheat’s Coronation Chicken but really that doesn’t thrill 3 of the 7 of our clan. I’ve marinated bite sized pieces in olive oil and seasonings then cooked it over oil in a skillet and mixed it with flavored rice for a chicken and rice dish that goes over okay. Simply slathering it in BBQ sauce and grilling it with sides of vegetables gets eaten but seems boring to me. Maybe I need to shred it and make BBQ chicken sandwiches. What’s your favorite child friendly chicken dish?

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From today’s Breaking News

I follow Breaking News on Twitter:

AP: A Cal. chopper pilot, who let a porn actress perform oral sex on him while flying, says he learned his lesson and wants his license back [Source, Twitter, @breakingnews]

I want to know how he got busted! um, I mean caught. Like, was there a 9-1-1 call? "Hello? 9-1-1? I have a hobby of watching helicopters with my telescope and I think you need to call this one into the FAA." or perhaps this was one of those bizarre Google Map/Google Earth things, "Now go to this longitude and latitude. See the helicopter? Right. Zoom in. That’s right! You’re seeing what you think you’re seeing. Now how is he supposed to safely land that thing with the inside of the windscreen like that?!"

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Knox County Schools – Your lack of creativity astounds me

Yesterday my middle schooler came home with a permission slip for a school field trip to Dollywood with a catch: The price is $43 and only the first 75 students to return a check and signed permission slip get to go. That’s not right! Additionally, the field trip will not allow the students on the water rides because Knox County Schools got all trippy after the death of a student at the waterfall 6 years ago. Yes that was a tragedy but we should have learned from the failings of supervision at that trip and continued water related activities but instead Knox County Schools decided bubble wrapping the children will protect them. Guess what? That won’t protect them either. I suppose Knox County Schools is assuming that of the 2.5 million visitors to Dollywood, our trip will be the one where highly inspected, super safety protected, engineered to simulate danger in the most cautionary way, equipment will fail at the same time all the trained and licensed lifeguards happen to be taking smoke breaks. It could happen! Denying water rides at a theme park? That’s not right! Can we make it better? What about not allowing digital cameras? Yes! Let’s prevent our children from the memorializing their time with their friends by not allowing them to take pictures. Granted, the school is afraid of being responsible for loss, theft or damage to a digital camera. Well guess what Sherlock! If I send a digital camera to school with my child and he loses it, that’s between him and me. I have an old digital camera sitting on my desk wasting away. If it got lost I’m out nothing. Of course, you want me to go buy an antique point and shoot disposable camera that is limited to 24 shots and cost an arm and a leg to print some thumbs over lenses. Brilliant! No wonder our children lag behind. Banning cameras? That’s not right! Eventually we will ban, regulated, lock up, and overprotect ourselves to being scared to death. What will you deny then? Don’t be scared or we’ll suspend you! Well guess what? That’s not right!

Oh, and today, my son brought home a permission slip for the band field trip. Guess where they’re going? Dollywood! (different day) That’s not right! For all the wonderful things we have in East TN, can our schools find nothing fun and mind expanding for our children? Oh, no, of course not; Knox County Schools is too worried about my digital camera. That’s not right!

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ShareThis WordPress Plugin Broken – Easy Fix!

I recently added a ShareThis link ShareThis.com to each of my posts. I chose ShareThis.com because it seems to be very robust while leaving a relatively small footprint on the blog and appears relatively unintrusiveness and benign. Of course, some folks will be quick to point out that the tracking features and having the icon linked back to sharethis.com is very intrusive and anything but benign. In this instance, I don’t see it as that big a deal. One of the attractions to ShareThis.com was its WordPress plugin making setup as easy as going to the website to generate the widget code, then inserting that code in the settings box on the admin screen in your WordPress blog. But it didn’t work.

At ShareThis.com, a publisher generates a script that looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345&amp;type=wordpress&amp;embeds=true&amp;post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&amp;headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!"></script>

After updating, the code will have a 2nd publisher id appended to the end. With two publisher ids, ShareThis will not register your site nor collect statistics.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345&amp;type=wordpress&amp;embeds=true&amp;post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&amp;headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!&amp;publisher=a1b2c3d4-ijkl-mnop-qrst-u4w2y10a2r4d"></script>

After reviewing the plugin code, I realized the way ShareThis generates the script must have changed overtime. Crowd Favorite wrote a great plug-in but it expects the publisher=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx to be at very end and if it does not find a publisher id at the end, it puts one there which is why you will end up with two publisher ids. To fix this, simply move the publisher id to the end of the script before pasting the code into the ShareThis settings box in the WordPress admin:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js#type=wordpress&amp;embeds=true&amp;post_services=facebook%2Cdigg%2Cdelicious%2Cybuzz%2Ctwitter%2Cstumbleupon%2Creddit%2Ctechnorati%2Cmixx%2Cblogger%2Ctypepad%2Cwordpress%2Cgoogle_bmarks%2Cwindows_live%2Cmyspace%2Cfark%2Cbus_exchange%2Cpropeller%2Cnewsvine%2Clinkedin%2Cfriendfeed&amp;headerTitle=Thank%20you%20for%20sharing!&amp;publisher=abcdefgh-ijkl-mnop-qrst-uvwxyz012345"></script>

Note: In the settings box, the &amp; will be converted to just & but the code correctly uses &amp; with the post. Your code will still be xhtml compliant.

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Questions from a wanna be Buddhist

When the day is spinning out of control, would stopping for 15 minutes of Daimoku help or make you feel 15 minutes more behind?

Buddhism is about revitalizing humanity, and transforming the world we live in from one dominated by greed, anger, and stupidity into one of peace and happiness. [Source, Jason Jarrett of A Buddhist Podcast, A Buddhist Podcast – Bodhisattvas of the Earth, 2:46-2:58]

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I need my batcave!

I love telecommuting! I’m a huge advocate of telecommuting. I think we will find great societal benefit to having a group paradigm shift and having at least half our workforce work from home. Imagine if suddenly companies only needed half (or less) of their existing infrastructure needs. Less electricity spent heating, cooling and lighting them. Fewer monolithic roads needed since fewer people are commuting. Who can telecommute? Accountants, lawyers, sales people, technical people, IT people, customer service, technical support, and so many more. Basically if you work from a desk, all your collaboration can be done online or in weekly onsite meetings. If you have to lay hands on materials like at an assembly line, then unfortunately that is more difficult to do remotely. Barack Obama encourages telecommuting and so does the US Patent Office. Ask your employer to let you work from home to save the environment, make you a happier more productive employee, save the company money, and spend more quality time with the family while simultaneously getting more work hours in for the boss.

Now, the downside! To be a successful telecommuter, you need a batcave; complete with a secret passage. The kids and animals cannot know about your batcave. Nor can the wife! It must be impossible to find. Now where’s my butler?!

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Active Thermite at WTC to Fuel Conspiracy Theories

Like the questions surrounding JFK’s assassination, I don’t think we will ever have definitive answers to what happened on September 11, 2001. Scientists, some who have since been released from their university or laboratory jobs, have released a paper "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" which will likely have conspiracy theorists once again presenting their arguments that the plane alone could not have destroyed the World Trade Center.

We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. … The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic. [Source, Bentham Open Access,Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe]

For more information on the super-thermite, read The Raw Deal.

Today on Reddit, the question was posed "2,740 Americans died in 9/11, justifying the removal/restrictions of many of our freedoms. How many people died to give us those rights in the first place?" Within the answers, this illuminating comment:

It’s sort of a nationalistic cliche to say that soldiers fight for our freedom but what they really fight for is the sovereignty of our government, which happens to guarantee us certain freedoms.

When we say a soldier died fighting for our freedoms, what we really mean is that he died in a war which threatened the loss of some or all of American sovereignty to a foreign or domestic power which would likely guarantee less rights than the present government.

This distinction is important because in the history of American wars, very few have definitively fallen under that category – and even in those cases, preserving the rights of American citizens was ancillary to sustaining or expanding the sovereign power of the U.S. government.

[Source, Reddit.com, 2,740 Americans died in 9/11, justifying the removal/restrictions of many of our freedoms. How many people died to give us those rights in the first place?]

We now live with a generation that has never known the feeling, the freedoms, we had prior to September 11, 2001. There is a different feeling. I felt more secure! I wish my youngest children could know that feeling and could experience true trust. I have lived with a tension since 9/11 that I had not known prior. The tension is not from a fear of terrorists; they’ve always been around (well, at least from the 1960s First U.S. Aircraft Hijacked, May 1, 1961 and at least 1800BC for the rest of the world). The fear is from my own government! Prior to 9/11 the police were different; now everyone should fear the police.

Question: “The police are here. They want to talk to me. What should I do?”

Answer: “Make no statement to the police under any circumstances.”

– Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson

[Source, Brasscheck TV, Why you should
never talk to cops
without a lawyer
]

The terrorists won.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

[Source, Bruce Schneier – Security Expert, Refuse to be Terrorized]

Whether the terrible incident of September 11, 2001 was foreign or domestic terrorism, whether it was solely the plane or the plane timed with well placed explosives is irrelevant. Our society has dramatically changed, some say irrevocably. We were a better America when we could trust our government. We were a better America when the police were not the enemy. We were a better America before Civil liberties were taken away.

See also: Timeline of Terrorism dating back to 1800BC and History of Terrorism 70s to 2001.
See also: Professor Says "Cutter Charges" Brought Down WTC Buildings (Issue #18 & 19, May 1 & 8, 2006)