Ursus Pacificus

Check dis out, yo!

http://www.ursuspacificus.net/imgal/main.php?g2_itemId=1758

Jews move to Alabama. On purpose. Temple Emmanu-El in Dothan, AL offered Matthew and Michelle Reed $50,000 to relocate to its… What? Parish? Basically the Temple is offering a signing bonus. It worked well in Gaza and the West Bank… I’m sure it’ll work out well in Alabama.

Since they can’t properly punish the perpetrator of a successful suicide, they decide to really go after the accessories to the “crime”. Calling to mind a recent sermon at The Church of No, Thanks, there’s a brouhaha going on in Georgia over the suicide of John Celmer, which allegedly involved “The Final Exit Network”. TFEN apparently flies around the country helping out people who really have had enough of their miserable, pointless lives, and, for whatever reason, are unable to “finish the job” without some sort of assistance. On the other side of the debate is a group called “Not Dead Yet”, which claims those whoe assist suicides are “predatory” and that they “target certain types of people”… like the ones who wish they could end their suffering?

Apparently, someone got voted off of American Idol. I thought I’d put up a story with some… y’know… gravitas. Pointless horseshit.

Idiot guy who’s not getting any younger turns down obscene offer from moronic team. It seems that athletic contract negotiation is becoming a spectator sport in itself. How long will it be before we hear about athletes’ agents doing this kind of crap to the athletes they represent?

OK, so I was catching up on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart… and he pulls out a jar of “Baconnaise”.

What the hell is Baconnaise? Well, this Wikipedia article doesn’t seem to know too much about it… but… apparently it’s bacon-flavored vegetarian mayonnaise.

Now, I like bacon… and I like mayonnaise… but… this… seems… uh… wrong.

Stewart tried… well.. “tried” is overstating it… he inadvertently allowed some Baconnaise LITE to touch his tongue… which resulted in almost a minute of spitting and swishing water around in his mouth. He then said, “I think my tongue just took a shit.”

Well, that’s all I need to know about Baconnaise!

I have Bill Maher’s “Religulous” on DVD, finally, and have viewed it a couple times. During viewing #1, with the GF, the part of the movie that focuses on
The Creation Museum left her slack-jawed. I was a little less surprised, knowing as I have for most of my life that, generally speaking, in this country, the average level of credulity seems to be inversely proportional to latitude and directly proportional to longitude. Since the Creation Museum is located in Kentucky, it seems safe to guess it’s banking on some fairly credulous patronage. Put another way, such a project would likely not have been so enthusiastically supported in, say, Vermont. This is supported by my highly scientific calculation (at least as scientific as the “science” you’ll likely find at The Creation Museum):

Given the hypothesis:
“The further South and West within the Continental United States one goes, the more credulous the average person seems to be.”

Let us first establish the 4 extreme points of the Continental United States. I chose Wikipedia as my source. My formula will allow the use of other values, but for the purposes of demonstration, let’s use the values I have at hand:

Continental US:
Northernmost: Lake of the Woods, MN (49.38N)
Easternmost: West Quoddy Head, Maine (66.95W)
Westernmost: Cape Alva, WA (124.71W)
Southernmost: Cape Sable, FL (25.12N)

Note: I have converted the “minutes” value to decimal (M/60) and discarded “seconds”. You can recalculate to higher precision if you like. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

If one was to create a “box” on the surface of the Earth, whose northern edge ran coincident with 49.38 degreed North latitude, whose Eastern edge ran coincident with 66.95 degrees West longitude, and so on (per the values above), one would create the region in which this calculation can be valid.

Given the values above, the Partial Relative Credulity (Latitude) (Crpa) of any location can be established with the following formula:

Crpa = ( 24.23 / (A - 25.12 ) ) - 1

Where A is the Latitude of the point in question.

Similarly, the Partial Relative Credulity (Longitude) (Crpo) can be found thusly:

Crpo = ( O - 66.95 ) / 57.76

Where O is the Longitude of the point in question.

Thus, the full Relative Credulity of a region’s population can be given as:

Cr = Crpa * Crpo

OR

Cr = ( ( 24.23 / ( A - 25.12 ) ) - 1 ) * ( ( O - 66.95 ) / 57.76 ) )


I live in Rhode Island, which, by some accounts, is populated by a fairly credulous lot. The lat and long of RI is (roughly) 41.7N 71.44W.

The “Creation Museum” (according to its website) is in, roughly, Idlewild, KY, positioned at 39.07N 84.79W

If we plug these values into the formula above, we find that Rhode Island has a Relative Credulity of .035, and Idlewild, KY has a Relative Credulity of .226. Not the most credulous people in the country, but certainly six-and-change times more credulous than the folks in RI.

Does this follow? You tell me.

I can tell you that when I lived in San Diego (the Southwestern-most major city in the continental US, Cr = 1.118) (1992-1998), the Promise Keepers filled what was then Jack Murphy Stadium, a Mormon Temple was completed, we had the Heaven’s Gate mass cult suicide and Dave Shelly and Chainsaw convinced the bulk of their listening audience that 1) The Space Shuttle would be landing at Montgomery Field in town AND 2) a truck carrying an orca (either to or from Sea World) had jackknifed on I8 in Mission Valley, and listeners were instructed to bring water to wet-down the whale until authorities to figure out what to do (both April Fools’ Day pranks).

What’s the Relative Credulity of YOUR home town?

As those of you who know me personally are aware (I mention this for the benefit of those who don’t), fashion is not my highest priority. Viz:

With this in mind, I’d like to direct your attention to two collections of examples why fashion is not a priority for me:

From September, 2008, a collection of photographs depicting mostly-sad men strutting down the runway in garments designed by people for whom “off the rack” is the actor’s Macbeth

…and from February 9 of this year, Jacobim Mugatu finally brings Derelicte! to life.

I dunno.. I mean… I guess fashion design is art, like painting or music…. but… when I see stuff like this, it hurts. Really.

Firstly, since most of us lack an appreciable coat of insulating fur or body hair, and live in temperate climates, clothes are a necessity for keeping warm. Most of the garments on display appear to have little if any insulating value.

Secondly, clothes usually serve, to one degree or another, a protective function. Not here.

Thirdly, clothes offer “coverage”… modesty may be a manufactured societal imposition, but I think I prefer being able to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings without grass clippings and sand sticking to my scrotum.

Lastly, clothes do, to an extent, say something about the wearer. These clothes say, “Hi, I’m vain, pointless, impractical and only gratuitously different. Love me, or I’ll kill myself.” That’s a first impression I don’t want to be on either side of.

Thanks to Pru for the BWE links

This Yahoo! News story mentions the attempted launch of a Taurus-XL rocket, carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory which would have provided better data to base climate models on… bummer.

Judging by the launch history of the Taurus-XL rocket, the last 2 Taurus launches involving the 63″ fairing have failed. The working explanation for the current one is a failure of the fairing to open properly. The previous 63″ fairing mission was to launch “Orbview-4/QuickTOMS” in 2001, and I have no idea at all what that was supposed to be. Nor have I been able to find anything relating to the launch failure. Weird.

The Taurus-XL is made by Orbital Sciences which also makes the Pegasus series of aircraft-launched expendable launch vehicles, components of which are incorporated into the Taurus-XL. I was watching a Nova special recently (I think it was “Death of a Star”) where they were interviewing this scientist involved in the HETE mission. This was back in 1996. The scientist they interviewed said (and I’m paraphrasing, here) that NASA told them HETE was going up on a Pegasus, and his team told NASA, in effect, that the Pegasus was the rocket you used if you wanted the mission to fail. NASA told them, you take this ride, or you don’t go. They took the ride and lost the mission. Great.

So this OCO mission sounds pretty timely, and important. I wonder if there’s going to be any attempt to launch another OCO… or… if, like most science missions, they get one try, and that’s it. Military missions, it seems like they just keep lobbing them up there until one sticks. Science apparently gets one shot.

Where to begin?!

OK… There’s the Nadya Suleman octuplets thing… You may recall I touched on it… well… To be honest, I’m fairly furious about the whole thing… So, I’ve decided to use my CafePress superpowers for the forces of reproductive restraint, and offer my Open Letter to Nady Suleman on T-Shirts. See below:

These groovy shirts display the full, angry text of my open letter, and they start at under $10.50!

Also new in the Ursus Pacificus department are the “blah, blah, blah” shirts. See for yourself:

…he said…

In the Dummyhead department, there’s a new section, called Dummyhead Team Gear. We all know what sports nuts the guys in Dummyhead are… well… now there are baseball jerseys and sweatshirts with the “baseball font” Dummyhead name on the front, and the band member’s name and “number” on the back, viz:

The sweatshirt (front).

The baseball jersey (back).

Well, I finally broke down and spent the $60 a year to get the Ursus Pacificus Kitsch Kave upgraded to a “Premium Store”.

Jiminy Glick! The merchandise options just opened up HUGE!!!

I’m trying to get everything organized into easily browse-able sections, so please be patient.

I’m also kicking off the newly revamped store with a new design:

it only hurts when I care

This is available on a bunch of stuff… shirts, mugs… you name it.

Dummyhead and The Church of No, Thanks have their on sections, now, which is positively thrilling!

Buffalo, NY-area TV mogul Muzzammil Hassan apparently has no sense of irony. According to this story on CNN.com, Hassan started Bridges TV, in part, to dispel Muslim stereotypes. Wow. Physician, heal thyself.

All across America, people are lining up to hand-write a verse of the NIV Holy Bible to be used in a new re-print of the NIV Holy Bible. This story on CNN drops a few names and so on, but doesn’t really go too deeply into the story… It turns out that Zondervan, the publisher which commissioned the NIV translation, is the outfit sponsoring the tour (which has a hell of a tour bus), and the outfit that will reap the financial rewards on the backs of these poor people. With over 300,000,000 copies of the NIV sold, worldwide, it’s fair to say they’ve made back the cost of the initial translation. Zondervan owns the NIV. Like Microsoft owns Windows, or George Lucas owns Star Wars. Like that. In the “all rights reserved” sense of “owns”. Perhaps the tour’s slogan should be reworded as, “31,173 verses, 90 cities, 1 motive”. This would be like if Microsoft had a bus driving around, which allowed each person to hand-write one line of source-code for Microsoft’s first product, Altair BASIC, then aggregated all the hand-written bits together and published them in a book to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the release of Altair BASIC. The book, of course, would be published through MicrosoftPress, with Microsoft collecting every penny, on the sale of a novelty item, based on some obsolete pile of text they still own the copyright to. So at least in the case of the “New International Version”, the Holy Bible isn’t God’s word, so much as it’s Zondervan’s word… and you people are writing it for them.

In other news, Al Sharpton has suddenly lost his mind. The Feb 18, 2009 Delonas cartoon in the New York Post depicts the freshly-shot chimp from the recent “chip eats woman’s face” attack in CT, with one cop saying to the other, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” Sharpton claims that the dead chimp in the cartoon is intended to represent President Obama. If so, it is an astonishingly poor representation. Look at the cartoon, then look at a photo of U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama. Report any striking similarity. Sharpton says it is racist. Bullshit. Take a look at this: http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=george+w+bush+chimp&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2. Is that racist?

With all the news that shouldn’t be news, I’m Paul Tourville.

Special thanks to Pru for the heads-up on the first 2 stories!

I’ve decided to split out the FAQ from the main Dummyhead page. The FAQ can be found here: http://www.ursuspacificus.net/blog/?page_id=340

Also, I’ve added a “Bios” page for the members of Dummyhead. That can be found here: http://www.ursuspacificus.net/blog/?page_id=341

Just sort of FYI