The Junk Drawer

I love odd news stories.  Here’s one from Salt Lake City:

Fire Breaks Out at Salt Lake Crematorium

A dead man had one final earthly act before moving on.

Fire officials said the six-hundred pound man was in being cremated when his body fluids were too much for the oven.

The body fluids seeped out onto the floor and ignited causing a fire at the Garner Funeral Home in Salt Lake City.

“Those fluids can be very flammable,” said Scott Freitag of the Salt Lake City fire department. “Sort of like a grease fire.”

An employee used an extinguisher to put out the fire.

The room is self-contained and has its own drainage system.

“There really is no risk or a hazard of it getting into the sewer system, the water system or into the general public,” said Freitag.

Firefighters rarely see these kind of fires.

But they say a six-hundred-pound body can create problems during a cremation.

“It really does condense or breaks down that fat into a greasy product, just like a grease fire,” said Freitag. “Only a little bit can cause a flame to go up.”

The crematorium is back in business and the funeral director said they’ll notify the family to assure them their loved one wasn’t harmed.

That last paragraph is almost as good as a punchline:  “…the funeral director said they’ll notify the family to assure them their loved one wasn’t harmed.”

Um.  He’s dead.  And his body was in the process of being burnt to ashes.  How exactly does one define “harm” in this instance?

The subject line of a spam email I received today:

“Now I can penetrate hardly and give the pleasure to every woman.”

Obviously this was written by a non-native English-speaking spam bot.  Penetrating hardly is hardly a ringing endorsement for the product.  But at least he can give the pleasure to every woman.  The pleasure of what, I’m not sure.  The pleasure of criticizing how he is hardly penetrating, perhaps.

Ah, the joys of cooking with spam.

How to keep your office mates from pestering you: eat a bowl of spicy kung pao for lunch, chased down by diet Pepsi.  Have a snack bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos for dessert. I guarantee people will leave you alone.

Because this blog is so dead, I had to write this.

I read at CNN today that at Steve Irwin’s funeral, murners heard a song titled “True Blue” by “Australian Country singer John Williamson.”  I didn’t even know Australia had a Country and Western music industry, but I suppose it makes sense in some way.  Both Australia and America were once rural, frontier nations, and former colonies of England.

So I went to iTunes and looked up the song True Blue [link will open iTunes].  The music isn’t bad.  The album is rather humorously titled for a “country” album, Old Man Emu.  To me, it sounds more like folk.  Even so, it’s not to my taste; however, I’ll be interested to see if sales of the song or album improve as a result of the publicity.  Right now, there are no customer reviews of the album at iTunes or at Amazon.  Amazon does not even offer a picture of the album cover.

This is an interesting news item I stumbled upon first via Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing: Karl Rove’s step-father was gay. Author James Moore outs the elder Rove in his new book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.

Although the title sounds sort of Kitty Kelly-ish, the excerpt published at the HuffPo has the ring of truth about it. What I particularly liked, in the context of a story about Rove’s gay family ties, was Moore quoting Karl’s passionate description of the first time he met George W. Bush.

Rove said once, “I can literally remember what he was wearing: an Air National Guard flight jacket, cowboy boots, complete with the - in Texas you see it a lot - one of the back pockets will have a circle worn in the pocket from where you carry your tin of snuff, your tin of tobacco. He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have.”

Homoerotic? Or is it just the admiration of a geek for the jock?

Read this fascinating NYT story. Here’s a portion:

Man Uses Chip to Control Robot With Thoughts

A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported today.
The development offers hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other ailments that impair movement might be able to better communicate with or control their world.

“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,’’ said John P. Donoghue, a professor at Brown University who led the development of the system and was the senior author of a report published today in the journal Nature.

In separate experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, was able to move a cursor, open e-mail, play a simple video game called Pong and draw a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume of a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.

I consider myself something of a connoisseur of euphemism and double talk. Politicians and military folk in particular provide plenty of examples of imprecise or euphemistic or jargon-laden speech ultimately signifying nothing. They just have so much truth to obscure, they quickly become adept at the ponderous turn of a bad phrase.

One of my recent favorites is the so-called “incentives package” the United States and Europe is offering Iran, in order for it to stop developing nuclear technology. In the ordinary world, an “incentives package” is rightfully called a bribe.

(Read on …)

The Librarian of Congress has appointed a new poet laureate, Donald Hall.  I was hoping there would be some sort of official appointment ceremony today, which I could attend, but I can’t find any information about it.

Here is the Washington Post story on the poet, Set to Verse: Donald Hall is New Poet Laureate.  And here is the Library of Congress official announcement, Librarian of Congress Appoints Donald Hall New Poet Laureate.

Here’s a clip from the Post story:

Other poets and critics cite a complex, book-length poem called “The One Day” — published in 1988 but composed over 17 years — as Hall’s greatest achievement.

“In a sense, it is the last masterpiece of American modernism,” said National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, noting that as such, it is unlike the bulk of Hall’s generally more accessible work. David Lehman, reviewing “The One Day” in The Washington Post, called it “loud, sweeping, multitudinous, an act of the imperial imagination,” and cited a climactic line suggestive of the poet’s fundamental take on life:

“Work, love, build a house and die. But build a house.”

I’m going to check out this book-length poem, The One Day it’s only 67 pages long, which technically, I think, means that it is novella length rather than book length…but who’s counting pages?  Oh, I guess I am…

I post a lot of photos on Flickr. A lot. Some I edit down later. And I’m often surprised by the things people mark as favorites; the same Yosemite shot that is easily shot by every tourist, for example. Nothing special, unless you’ve never been there, and haven’t seen these same shots before.

The interesting thing about Flickr is that it’s so much more than a place to store your photos. There’s an entire community of people posting in groups and commenting on each other’s photos (sometimes nastily). It’s an interesting way to meet people, or find some really stunning photos and be inspired to take some of your own.

It’s fun to see that people have favorited a particular shot of yours, even if you don’t like it as much. It’s also nice to get comments. I often randomly comment on photos if they catch my eye. It also helps bring people to my photos, so they can comment or perhaps make me a new contact.

As part of this networking, occasionally someone might ask to use a photo. Because I mark them all as creative commons, that means that I allow anyone to use them for free, as long as they meet certain criteria. Like crediting my work, or at least asking my permisison first. I’ve had a cat picture used as part of a blog entry, another couple of cat pictures have been posted to a photo map.

Sometimes it’s a surprise. I googled myself to find that my photos had ended up somewhere I hadn’t expected them, on a travel site, but hey, they’re creative commons. Fine.

A couple of months ago, someone contacted me to use a photo I’d taken in Ventura, Calif. He was planning to use it for something with a shoe company’s web site leading up to the World Cup. I agreed, and he said he’d send a link when he was finished.

I saw it just the other day, and was surprised by the use. I didn’t know what to expect, but it ended up being used in a promotional blog. My journalistic nerves are jangled a little, but in the end, I know it’s an advertising site, so I guess it’s OK.

And it’s somewhat gratifying in a narcissistic sense, even if no one knows that it’s really my photo or that it’s in California and not Tunisia.

Assuming you are logged in to the NYT, this article on religion in recent film might be of interest to you, even if its ultimate conclusions are somewhat obvious. Here are the first few paragraphs:

“You don’t believe in God?” Tom Hanks’s character asks Audrey Tautou, who plays his partner-in-ciphers in “The Da Vinci Code.”

“Do you believe in God?” Liev Schreiber’s character asks a therapist who doubts that his adopted son, Damien, has devil genes in the new version of “The Omen.”

“Get right with God,” William Hurt preaches in the small, intense film “The King,” but he’s playing an evangelical minister, so he’s a lot more certain.

With echo upon echo of faith-based dialogue, movie theaters today often sound like church. But what seems like a new willingness to explore questions of faith — as if Mel Gibson’s blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ” had made religion safe for Hollywood — has the spiritual depth of the “Daily Show” segment “This Week in God,” with its quiz-show-style “God Machine” that spits out religions to satirize.